The Itty Bitty Tank Commitee

A few months back I went all Epic mad and ended up buying quite a lot of the stuff. It's not easy. Epic has officially been dead for a while and getting hold of miniatures is expensive, particularly the infantry. I lament selling my Epic armies; Eldar and Emperor's Children but apparently food is essential to life so whatever.

Out in the world there is a thing called Forumware. This is where fans of Epic who have way more talent than you or I have sculpted their own models that they cast up for personal use. This stuff is amazing. I have seen entire Horus Heresy Legions sculpted to resemble Forge World's current fare and painted to a standard worthy of full sized Golden Daemon standard. Unfortunately you cannot get hold of that stuff so I have been scrabbling around ebay and anywhere else I can think of to build up my collection.

Out of the blue I received a solicitation email from one of the small independent companies I have used for unique and interesting miniatures in the past. I can't tell you who they are as they went to great lengths not to publicise their awesome but obviously plagiarised designs. Still, if Games Workshop won't sell me the things I want, I'll get them elsewhere.

The kit is a metal resin hybrid. The resin parts are the main hull and track sections cast on a single sheet of resin. The resin is very good quality and a crisp cast with no air bubbles and plenty of detail. The plain sides of the resin parts were very smooth so I took a few minutes to rough up the texture to help the glue bond the parts together better. The metal parts are the hatches. These drop in parts could easily be replaced with turret and sponson alternative parts to create Razorbacks, Whirlwinds and Predators. Vindicators would need a different hull and probably could get away with no metal parts at all. There is a final piece which I will discuss further down but it is a solid piece of metal that is not meant to be part of the model.

Clean your resin in warm soapy water. Doesn't matter who the manufacturer is or the type of resin, give it a good soak and dry by wrapping it in and then dabbing it with kitchen roll. It is soft and absorbent and will get rid of that moisture. Moist. Why do people have a problem with that word?

The big solid bit of metal is actually a tool to help you construct your rhinos. There are no guide marks to allow your track sections to be applied correctly so that both sides fit in exactly the same space on either side of the main hull. Using this tool you can position all the parts so that when the glue is dry you have a perfect Rhino and not a lopsided mess.

Once you have completed your mini-me Rhinos you have an attractive and highly detailed miniature for your efforts. These Rhinos are slightly larger than the standard plastic Epic Rhinos but are a better fit scale wise for the Epic infantry.

I really like these models and wouldn't mind having a whole army of models in this design. Forge World announced that Adeptus Titanicus will herald the beginning of a new Epic system that will see tanks and infantry added after the Titan range has been fleshed out. The scale is different so whilst we will see more recent versions of standard template vehicles they will not be compatible with existing Epic collections so this is the only way to boost your forces with new shiny marks of tanks.

There has been sighted an Ultramarine specific version of these Rhinos on the horizon for those of us you can't sculpt for crap. Not a Ultra player myself so fingers crossed for something Dark Angels alongside these.

PS... they do Necrons too.

Lee