The Iron Gargant / Liborkty Prime WIP: Part 1

About two weeks ago, I debuted my 2018 Armies on Parade Board. Mad Mekz: Fury Road. In it, you see a huge Ork Knight/Gorkanaut thing, and I had a lot of people ask me for close-ups. The close-ups will be coming, but I’ll do you one better and walk you through the steps of how I converted it.

I’ll say that this is something that has been in my head for the longest time, and I’m glad that I can finally see it as an actual physical product.

A few years back, the Gorkanaut/Morkanaut debuted. I love Orks but I hate the pot-bellied aesthetic that their bigger walkers have. The Gorkanaut has that issue, and so does the Stompa. But looking at the bits, I knew there was potential there. I always had the desire since the Gorkanaut Kit to come out to split it up into two models; to use the gorkanaut belly as part of breaching tank type battlewagon, and to trim the Gorkanaut into a proper humanoid type walker. I had also painted my Brotherhood of Steal as a play on Fallout’s Brotherhood of Steel, so I knew I wanted my Gorkanaut to be related to Fallout in some way.

Naturally, I leaned towards Fallout’s design of Liberty Prime. Because it was so similar, I also ended up drawing from the Iron Giant as well.

(Incidentally, I see-saw between ‘Liborkty Prime’ and ‘The Iron Gargant’ as their names. I’m still undecided.)

To be honest, I didn’t actually know what or how I would convert the base kit until I saw a Grotskull’s Red Gobbo Gorkanaut Mod and fell in love with it. Unfortunately, I don’t think I can find the original forum thread, but Grotskull now has a facebook page with all of his old (and new) stuff, and I recommend you check it out. That was proof that I could take Games Workshop’s base kit and make a leaner, meaner version of a Gorkanaut.

Even then, the idea would only be stewing in my head until last year. After 2017’s Armies on Parade, I knew that I wanted to do orks. I wanted to do a Mad Max Fury Road themed board. And I wanted to actually build and paint all the things that had been in my head for so long. So 2017 and 2018 would be when I would see all my Ork Mekboy ideas to fruition.

Now unfortunately (as usual) I didn’t take some of the very important preliminary steps, but I want to show you how I did it so you can figure out how to make your own as well, so I’m trying to reconstruct how I built the damn thing.

First up I built the back of the gorkanaut just like how the instructions mentioned it. You can see how similar it is to the Red Gobbo up top. I’d end up flipping and rotating it on my Iron Gargant / Liborkty Prime, but it’s essentially the same thing.

I think grotskull’s red gobbo ended up using a dreadnought bit for his legs, but I went with a different tack with mine.

The side bits of the gorkanaut (circled in red) are what connect the pot belly to the legs, so that would end up being my hip. Why fix something that aint broke? Only problem is, that would be too wide for the Iron Gargant / Liborkty Prime silhouette, so some tweaks would still have to be made. I cut off the circled parts of 78 and 79, then only used the sides of part 60 (cutting off the middle). This allowed me to narrow the hip area, while still using a lot of the connective bits of the original gorkanaut kit.

You can see though that while half of the torso and half of the hip is built, there’s still a whole lot I’d have to patch up with plasticard or something else, and since these are main parts of the model that all the arms and legs would connect to, it would need to have a lot of structural integrity. But you get an idea of what I want to do.

Next week: completing the torso!