Ork Warbuggy

Greetings vaqueros! Today we'll be celebrating the end of the 21 year career of the 2nd edition Ork Warbuggy!

Orks were my first army in the 40k universe, as I've probably mentioned once or twice, and while I always wanted one of these bad boys, I somehow never got around to buying the warbuggy until earlier this year when they were still available to buy from GW's webstore. I believe this may be one of their longest serving plastic kits - the ork bike of the same era got a rerelease a year or two back as the 'Space Ork Blastabike' but is now being produced by Revell so it only partly counts! This venerable kit has finally been retired in order to usher in the new range of ace ork vehicles that have come screeching into our lives in a cloud of burnt rubber and human, so it seemed a fitting time to get one done before my attention is grabbed forever by the new shinies. Mmm, so shiny.

The keen eyed among you may have already noticed that I didn't assemble this vehicle by the instructions - I've replaced the crew with armless metal minis from the 2nd ed range to better fit in with the rest of my army. The crew, while iconic in their own way, are almost an entirely different scale to the average ork of the times, pushing the limits of bio-diversity and imagination at once. This trend continued from the Rogue Trader range, which was already small to begin with. Ork Speed Freeks are just really small dudes. Probably helps them go fasta...

The warbuggy kit comes stock with a multi-melta that resembles a Laramie Super-Soaker, and while I'm very fond of it, I wanted something a bit more no-nonsense to stick on my ramshackle war-kart crewed by fungus-men. These two heavy shootas look the business, and with a little tinkering I put an ammo box on both sides so there'll be plenty of dakka to go around. 

Those are definitely rust stains. Not any kind of other stains.

The metal gunner is bigger overall than the plastic one, but strangely not as tall, so I had to cut down the gun mount and give him a little platform from the Gorkamorka Rokkit Buggy set so he could at least see down the gun's sights. This element took the longest to model and is not something I'm itching to do twice, so if I get around to doing more of these it will be interesting to see what the loadout is...

"Caught under wheels rollin'"

I managed to source a whole pile of these grinning moon shield decorations from eBay to save me having to freehand a lot of moons. I mean I love moons, but not that much. Certain individuals who will go unnamed wanted me to file off the skulls on the front here because they look dumb, to which I say, YOU look dumb. Handsome but dumb. Just the way I like them. Carry on.

This force of Black Moon Mercenaries is coming along slowly but surely, and I'm having a lot of fun with them. Having finally nailed down a scheme that I like for this new chapter in my ork story, I hope to produce more minis at a faster rate - maybe not as fast as a warbuggy crewed by psychotic green killers, but, like, pretty fast.

And what's next? Well since we're breathing new life into old models, maybe we can roll some old bikes out of the shed and fix them up too...

"Every part of the collection of broken 90's toys is used..."

Adios for now!