As mentioned last post, I’m in the Lead Adventure Forum’s Build Something Contest 2025. I’ve entered a few over the decades, finished my entries in even fewer, and ever gotten out of the first round of voting, so we shall see, but it’s always a great contest to watch even if you aren’t participating.
Photos to date below – today (Sat 1 Feb) I got the floor and three main walls of the cargo bay built and assembled. Engines and landing gear next, then figuring out how the actual skin of the shuttle is going to cover all this stuff!
One of the classic sources of kitbashing/scratchbuilding detail parts – a 1/72 MBT, in this case a Tamiya LeClerc. Also at the top of the photo, half-round pearls from the dollar store, because you can never have enough dome shapes for sci-fi building!Also from the dollar store, an entire baggie of googly eyes. Some of these might well wind up as actual eyes in silly places, but a bunch of them are just going to be interesting shapes for kitbashing.Cargo bay floor. LeClerc track pieces for detail.The assembled cargo bay. The side walls need at least one more round of detailing!Cargo bay, showing the other side wall.Wider workbench shot.
The main thing now is going to be maintaining momentum and not getting bogged down in overthinking this damn thing. Onward!
The campaign funded (just!) which was cool, and I put in for 3 sprues. Molding up an injection molded plastic production run takes time and it was late October 2024 before I got my loot, but communication from Pete was good the whole time.
So what do you get? The sprue is roughly 6″ by 8.5″ and well-supplied with everything from shark jaws to antlers to femurs to hacked-off hands on spikes or hooks! I was mostly interested in the antlers and goat horns, but there’s lots of other neat stuff to accessorize scratchbuilding or kitbashing with!
The front of the Dead Animal Bits sprue. See text for details.The back of the sprue. See text for details!
Right in the centre of the sprue there’s half a dozen big shark jaws; the top of the sprue has two different style of goat/sheep (demon?) horn each in several sizes, and deer/elk antlers in three sizes. Below the shark’s jaws there’s some feathers (the small things off to the left of the front view), some rib cages, a bunch of severed hands on spikes or hooks, another style of curled goat horn in two different sizes, a few individual shark teeth, and finally a batch of femur-looking bones, again in several sizes.
A closeup – this is the top left of the front of the sprue. Horns, antlers, hands and heads on hooks, and shark teeth here.
If you want to do whole units of antlered or horned troops you’ll likely burn through a bunch of sprues, but if you just want to add general weirdness here and there a set of these sprues should keep you happily adding weirdness for a good long while.
I’ll be adding horns and antlers to a batch of undead infantry I have in progress, and they’ll definitely be showing up in some of the stranger plans for my slow-burn 17th C pike and shot fantasy project, and in the best tradition of being inspired by random stuff that’s now in your Pile of Opportunity, I’m sure they’ll be showing up elsewhere too…
Conversion bits for strange projects can be hard to come by, even these days when high quality plastic figures make kitbashing and bits-finding easier. One of the staples of a certain flavour of folk horror, though, is folks with antlers, either on their helms or straight up growing out of their heads, and nobody has done horns, antlers, and such… yet.
Some of the planned bits. Image ganked from the Kickstarter page and cropped.
His campaign video is also over on YouTube and is nicely done, and one sprue will give you enough related bits to do whole units up similarly, which is always nice.
The Dead Animal Bits intro video
I’ve backed for a pouch of bits, 3 full sprues, and I’m really hoping to see this funded and produced so I can get inspired to get back to my weird folk horror 17th C stuff sometime in the new year!
So, if antlers and horns and bones and teeth and feathers and other gribbly conversion bits are an interest, have a look before December 18 2023 and consider backing Dead Animal Bits.
Not a paid endorsement or anything, just one of those chance finds via social media that slots very, very neatly into some of my specialized wargaming interests!
