Ork Speed Freeks - A Work In Progress 1

I've started on making an Ork Warhammer 40k army. 3D printer go brrrrr.

Almost every model I'm using is from Gear Guts' Mek Shop. Lemme tell you about them first so I can move on with the fancy pictures and stuff. First, I subscribe to his Patreon which I recommend to anyone doing 3D printing since it's one of the best value Patreons I've seen. The USA shop (linked above) sells the print files and also printed models. If you're in the UK or Australia there's shops that sell printed models (yay lower postage!) but not the files. Rumor has it there may be a vendor in Canada at some point but as of now there isn't one.

For those not familiar with Warhammer 40k I'll give you a summary of what's going on. You have models. You roll dice. Either you win or lose the fight. OK. I'll be nice and give more detail. When playing you choose a point value for the game (typically). Then within that point value you pick and choose models with various roles, based on the rules, to fill it out. I've chosen a faction that's quite frankly silly but fun - Orks. The roles are the same across the game but the model roles have different names.

I was doing random printing for a while then found a local group that seems nice and meets regularly. That meant putting together a playable force. I poked around on the Discord and Facebook groups to see posted army lists that didn't chase the meta and found a couple of forces I liked. I settled on a 500 point Speed Freek force to start learning the game.

That meant printing warbikers. A lot of warbikers. But that's fine because GG put out a lot of warbiker sets so I had variety, which I really like on the table.

After much printing I had this:

These aren't totally warbikers. The vehicle on the left is a Megatrakk Scrapjet that I already had printed. That one is off the filament printer so it has layer lines. I played with various ways to minimize them but forgot that the missiles are pretty rough. Oh well. That's what paint is for. The big guy in the middle is the boss - the Deffkilla Wartrike. I chose that model because I liked the oddity of having two wheels in front rather than in back. Finally I have the Boss Nobz on their bigger, fancier warbikes. I accidentally printed two of one of them so I have an extra that I'll paint up because I'll use it at some point later. They're not actually missing arms. Those have been magentized and printed separate since they have weapon choices.

These are the warbikers. They're kind of low level cavalry and the lowest level in this force. As you can see I went for a variety of models so that they'll be more interesting on the table. That jerk in the upper left caused me no end of issues until I finally drilled holes and pinned parts of it together. That showed him. Once again I have one more than I need for this force but hey, I'll use it at some point.

3D Printing

I figure the printing part should get it's own little section in this first post. Each warbiker (boyz and nobz) was a separate print and took about four hours. The Deffkilla Wartrike took two prints and about maybe six or seven hours. The Megatrakk Scrapjet (I had to look this one up since I printed it a while ago) twelve hours on the filament printer but would have taken two or three prints on the resin one for no time savings but also no layer lines.

I won't get into comparing costs with buying them from Games Workshop. That's not the point here even though I know I saved money on most models I print. The point is that I get a huge variety that you don't get from boxed sets. I can also edit the files to have magnet holes printed into them for when I want to be able to swap out parts. With kits, if you get the parts you need to be able to swap them out at all, you need to drill holes and no one likes that.

GG also is nice enough to have the gun barrels recessed so that's less work since drilling out gun barrels is part of detailed model preparation. Yes, I know you can paint the black dot and make it look like the barrels are drilled but that's not a concern when it's part of the model.

I've also printed the bases for when they're ready to be used. I didn't print fancy ones since my plan is to do the traditional sand bases with some grass tufts. I have sand. I have grass tufts. I don't want to print fancy base toppers. It was an easy decision and I can print the bases very nicely on the filament printer.

Painting

The rest of the posts will be about painting the models. That's the fun part. Orks aren't known for their precision or fashion sense. They're the only faction in the game rules that's allowed to loot models from any other faction and make them their own. Colors have meaning to Orks because part of their silliness is that whatever they believe happens. They believe that red makes vehicles go faster so the rules give you that option to give them extra movement. The various Ork clans also have colors to differentiate them.

The good thing is that you can mix up the colors without a problem. Just because yellow is used for a certain clan doesn't mean that same color can't be in a different clan army. This is excellent because if not for that you'd either have to pick a clan and stick with it or have multiple models painted in multiple colors. While GW would just love for you to have the multiple models (don't get me started on 'what you see is what you get' rules) the general flow is just to say what clan(s) things are when playing.

The pictures show the primed models. I went fancy and tried using an appropriate color of primer for what the part will eventually be painted. Black primer where there will be a black base coat is a no brainer. Grey is a neutral for the body of the vehicle. White is for the 'contrast paint' (Part 1 and Part 2 of that process) since I developed the color scheme to work over white and personally prefer white as a primer color anyway.

I will probably do the same thing with future models. It's kind of a pain and it makes me learn how to better control my airbrush but it should work out better in the long run. I'll know that as I paint these. I highly recommend Badger Stynylrez primer for either airbrushing or brush painting. That stuff sticks like you wouldn't believe. I linked to their main site but you can find it on Amazon as well. I don't know what's in it but I firmly believe that it's some kind of unicorn fluid and we'll leave it at that.

The treads on the Skrapjet (I got tired of typing out the full name) I also airbrushed in the black paint base coat because those things are brush killers. If you can see it at all you can see it isn't as shiny as the rest.

Here's the work I did last night - base coating. I bought a pack of cheap synthetic brushes for painting vehicles because there's no way my mini painting brushes were appropriate and even with my my massive brush collection I didn't have the right ones for this work. Everything but the tires are painted with Reaper Pure Black. The tires are Secret Weapon Tire Black, which is actually kind of green black. Secret Weapon is no longer available so this is me using my stocks.

Going forward I'm probably going to use craft acrylic paint for the black base coat. There's no reason that I can see for using the expensive miniature paint for this. It's black and it's going to mostly get covered over with other colors. I'm going to have a close look to see if the Tire Black is different enough from the Pure Black to justify using it here. It's a thin paint out of the bottle so it may need two coats to show a difference and with it being in short supply I don't know that I want to use it on army painting. I'll make that call when I see it.

The next step will be painting the undercarriages. Those will be streaky metallic since they will have been fairly abused by terrain and they're not visible for the most part. I know I could leave them black but metallic will stand out more against a neutral background. If these were flush with the bases I wouldn't bother and probably wouldn't have primed them at all to get a better glue bond.

Speaking of glue bonds I did try a little sanding to make flat spots on the tires so the bikes would 'sit' better and have larger contact points with the bases. I found out the resin is excellently hard and sanding was a tedious process for minor results. I always planned on pinning the bikes to the bases anyway and the sand will hide the fact that the tires aren't compressed. I can strip the paint off the contact points when it's time to combine them so I didn't bother with trying to avoid painting the areas I did sand.

I'm kind of sort of waiting for some paints I ordered from Warcolours before painting on colors but they're taking their own sweet time getting here from Greece so I may use some of my copious paint collection to start. I want the colors to be different shades. That fits the aesthetic of the faction. I always planned on painting them in groups so that they would have different shades. I just wanted the new stuff as opposed to the hundreds of bottles of paint I already have.