Tag Archives: conversion

Gaslands, Painting

The Queen of the Waste

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The Queen is the largest Gaslands vehicle I’ve done so far and by far the most complex conversion I’ve done for the game!

She started life as a city busy of some sort, sourced I think from Ali Express by Corey, sat around in his stash for a while, then became mine when I volunteered to make something cool to terrorize our Gaslands games with! She’s true-scale to Matchbox/Hot Wheels cars, so very close to six inches long now that I’ve finished a full post-apoc war bus conversion job.

Planning the Queen. Bus chassic, truck cab, tanker truck parts, and the engine from the dragster.
Dremelled the truck apart, first step of construction!
The massive front ram taking shape.
Flamethrower deck.
Armour. Very important.
Test fitting some crew, first glimpse of the rear fighting platform.
The ram from the front.
The tail of the beast.
Primed and painting started.
Pink? Why not?
Weathered, crew installed, other details installed on both fighting platforms.
The Queen rolls out! Her first in-game appearance.
Gaslands, Painting

Cars for Gaslands

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We’ve had a couple more Gaslands-by-webcam sessions since Corey wrote up his how-to and that’s inspired me to finally get the first few cars built up properly.

I’d primed and painted these cars months ago and they probably even appear in a few of our game photos, but I’d rushed the painting so the primer was scratching off far too easily, and I really hadn’t done much conversion.

I dropped the metal car bodies back in Simple Green to reset them to bare metal, then set about properly converting them into post-apoc Gaslands armed cars! Some time ago we’d done a group order to North Star for a bunch of their Instruments of Carnage plastic accessory sprues and those plus bits of plasticard from my parts box has gotten me three armed, up-armoured cars, all Gaslands Refuelled legal designs.

Vlad the Impala in progress. The huge absurd exhaust stacks, bulldozer blade ram, pintle mount gunner, and sheet metal spoiler are all from the North Star accessories. Click for larger.

The first and largest of the three cars is Vlad the Impala, with a turreted MG or HMG, ram plate salvaged from a bulldozer blade, huge exhaust stacks coming directly off the engine block, and “spoiler” on the back hacked from a piece of sheet metal. The windows also got barred off with plastic strips.

The school of Barracudas. Dual MG/HMG on the left and in-progress bar armour over the windows; the right hand ‘Cuda has an air scoop, single front HMG, a rear dropped weapon (not yet fitted), and sheet metal over the front and rear windows.

The two Barracudas are slightly smaller. One of them got an air scoop on the hood, a single HMG mounted alongside, sheet metal on the windows, and a dropped weapon (usually mines) off the back. Barracuda 2 got metal bar armour over the windows and reinforcing the front and back of the car, and a pair of MGs or HMGs on the hood.

Vlad the Impala all primed and ready for paint, with the bar armour over the front window nicely visible. I scarred up the ram plate with files, an Xacto knife, and a tiny drillbit a little bit, because it’s such a prominent feature of the car. The exhaust stacks stick up so high as to get in the way of the gun mount, but Rule of Cool prevails so I’m sure the gunner can work around that little detail. Click for larger.
All three cars all ranked up ready for painting. Click for larger.

I’m pretty sure that one reason I had trouble getting paint to stick to the metal toy car bodies the first time I tried painting these cars was because I rushed off to paint before the primer coat had properly cured, so I’m going to put this trio aside for a couple of days to give the primer a chance to really properly dry and cure.

Rear quarter view of all three cars. Very pleased with all three of them, and looking forward to getting paint on them soon! Click for larger.

I haven’t actually finalized a paint scheme for any of them, although I suspect Vlad the Impala will wind up red and black, with one of the Barracudas mostly purple and the other blue, just because. There are driver figures on the North Star sprues, but with all the window armour none of the driver seats are particularly visible, so I think I’ll save them for other projects with more visible crew positions.

Given that our current COVID restrictions are running until at least mid-February at this point, I am probably going to finish all three of these and then drop them off at Corey’s place, along with the jumps and other terrain I finished late last year so they can appear in our webcam games as lockdown drags on!