The Iron Gargant / Liborkty Prime WIP: Part 2

In Part 1 you saw how I started with the idea of the Iron Gargant’s chest and hips. The next problem would be figuring out the underlying structure. So this post will be me fiddling with a lot of the morkanaut’s internal gubbinz and making sure there’s enough structural integrity to make the whole damn thing works.

Well.. actually that’s going to be a bit later. Because I knew what I wanted to do with the legs, but wasn’t sure how to solve the chest/hip issue yet. So LEGS!

Legs

The morkanaut has some great, chunky legs. They have the same amount of heft (I would argue more) as a knight’s legs, and they look very humanoid. Unfortunately they are a bit on the short side, and connect to the original morkanaut’s armpit. Which is silly as all heck and which the hip re-positioning fixes. However, I still had to solve the issue of the legs being too short.

Cue leg extensions!

I didn’t want to cut the upper leg because:

1. the pipes and tubes are very nice detail that I want to preserve and
2. in the iron giant, liberty prime and other robots (and gundams and stuff) the lower leg is longer.

Plus I will be able to over it all up with some armor plating and detail work anyway. So as you can see I chopped up the bottom half of the leg and pinned it through (actually I think I ended up with two pins on each leg for additional stability).

I also sliced the top part of each foot off, as I wanted a smaller foot (more like the ones on humanoid robots) than the ginormous morkanaut version.

You can see me measuring out the plasticard to act as plates to coverup that horrible ork leg extension surgery. I needed it to be a bit more precise than usual because I wanted the top and bottom of the leg to line up properly.

This is me using epoxy to put the plates on the leg. I would use plastic glue to establish a quick bond between the top and bottom of the foot, followed by epoxy to give it more structural support. You also see that the morkanaut leg is essentially hollow, which is why instead of one huge pin going down the middle I actually used two needles to pin the left and right armor place of the leg. This left/right thing also reduces the chance the leg would fall apart due to twisting and shear.

Here you can see the leg all covered up. Some additional details include the riveting on the feet, as well as the fact that I removed some of the placement nubs on the knee joint to ensure that the legs can stand up a bit straighter.

This is with the legs kinda finished, just so I could get a sense of how things were progressing. Looking good so far!

After that, I noticed that I wasn’t able to get the knight shin plates on the leg, so I added two plasticard I-beams as support for the knight armor to glue on to.

Chest

As an Ork, I tend to collect random stuff from people. I grab any hand-me-downs from friends who build their models and don’t like to keep their bits. (Shout out to Russell, who is the reason why my Orks feature so much tau weaponry!) I also buy half assembled, poorly built, or abandoned models from around and try to upcycle them. Preferably things that can be pulled apart easily, since I tend to kit bash A LOT.

So I had bits of a poorly assembled knight that had been sitting in my to-kitbash box for a long time. He was already mostly stripped (the guy I got it from wanted to keep some of the arm and weapon bits to swap a second knight he had) but the internal structure was still there, if a bit messed up. Which was why I ended up re-purposing the chest and legs into the Iron Gargant (or Liborkty Prime).

Here you can see I used the bottom part of the knight body, as well as the back. I think i had to cut off some bits off those pieces, and I didn’t use the side chest pieces. I also stuck a ginormous pin connecting the morkanaut bits to the knight bits, to make sure it wouldn’t move.

Follow that up with a lot more putty around the pins for additional structure, and then covering the holes up with plasticard. I didn’t bother with prettying up the plates too much because I was planning to stick even more detail on top of that.

Here you can see the front of the chest. I happened to have a rack of missiles that (kind of) fit, so I stuck that on to the gaping hole. After I expanded the hole a bit (the missiles didn’t exaaaactly fit).

Hips

Once the chest was figured out the hips were pretty simple. I covered over the large gaping holes with plasticard, then looked for relatively flat pieces in my bits box to add detail.

And well, since I was using the chest part of the knight, might as well use the connecting piece of the hip too right? I had to pry it out of the rest of the original knight, but I guess it works well enough.

I also added a 40mm base for added height, and sliced up some bits of plastic rod to act as rivets.

To be honest, I’ve been in two minds about that extra 40mm base. On one hand, it does give the morkanaut/gargant/liborkty a bit more height, which I think is very important. On the other hand, I think it makes the torso a bit more disproportionate than I would’ve liked. I’m still undecided if the addition was necessary. Thankfully though, you don’t really notice it once it’s all painted up.

Next week: The rest!