Now that OGRE minis are no longer an endangered species that sell for scores of dollars per light tank on Ebay, I've gone nuts again.

PARTS AND SCRATCHBUILDING:
I live and die by Evergreen sheet styrene and plastruct extruded rods, tubes, and other shapes of polystyrene plastic. It's easy to cut, you glue it with standard model glue, and it's pretty durable.

The most significant thing most people miss when they think about building itty-bitty minis or converting them is to use pre-existing shapes. Trying to build a miniature from scratch is very hard, and not a good starting project, but if you take the head and hands from an existing mini, modeling a body with a different robe or cloak isn't so hard. In the world of OGRE and itty-bitty armor and buildings, if you need something hexagonal, use a hex-nut for it. If you need something square, they make square-nuts too. Use either of these sawn in half (I use a dremel myself, it's faster, and I never cut exactly in half, but instead cut off about 3/8 of the nut, and use a file to file the rest down to the halfway mark. Time consuming but much more accurate!) to brace plastruct sheet to get nice 60 or 120 or 45 or 90 degree angles which are clean and repeatable...And add durability and weight to the mini as well. Likewise, look for other small geometric shapes that you can stick onto a mini and use. If I were building an OGRE variation from scratch, for example, I know I'd be looking in a bead store for some nice spherical beads with big holes in the middle to seat those main guns in. Using these ready-made shapes makes scratchbuilding miniatures -much- less of a challenge.

I will not discuss molding and casting of your scratchbuilt minis here. There are other sites for that on the net, and I don't want to see any counterfeit OGREs wandering around. I've waited a long time to see OGRE Minis come back, and they need to make money if they're going to stay. Be nice. Think of how many OGREs and GEVs and such you can get for the price of even a fourth of an army of Space Mar...Er. Those other things. More importantly, think of what just happened to FASA and Ral Partha. One of the oldest names in the miniatures business and one of the larger RPG companies, they've gone tits-up together this year because they just couldn't sustain themselves. Do your part to make sure that doesn't happen to SJG's line of OGRE Miniatures. Don't use what you haven't paid for, you'll just have cut your own throat if the line gets discontinued again.

PROJECT HUSCARL:
"...while early Paneuropean Mark IIIs looked just like their Combine cousins, the Mark V variants produced at Stuttgart were distinctly different from any Combine units. Paneurope called this the 'Huscarl'. Some versions of the Huscarl dispensed entirely with the characteristic Ogre tower." (from the OGRE Miniatures rulebook, published by Steve Jackson Games)

So the most distinctive form of Huscarl hasn't got the conning tower. That's not hard to manage: File off the edges of the conning tower base so that they're flush with the armor plates of the hull, then build up the hull with fifty-fifty blended green stuff and milliput. You can file this mix pretty easily, again bring it up flush with the existing armor plates, raising it into a sort of ventral 'fin' which blends back into the ridge along the OGRE's crest.A few bits of styrene plasticard can be used to extend that ridge. So far so good. But the versions with the conning tower were still 'distinctly different'.

Okay, so I looked at the Fencer, the quintessential PE cybertank. Hm. What's it got that the Mk III and Mk V don't? No, no, not the missile racks...It's got turrets! It's got all those neat little twin-mount AP guns. Now we begin REALLY gouging up our OGRE. IF you aren't comfortable hacking a $25 miniature to bits, run away now!

First, I filed off all of the existing AP guns on the Mk V and used an Xacto to extend the lines of the armor plates where the AP guns obscured them. I was especially happy to get rid of the )(*@#$@#$@# nipples on the back. Sorry, I just never liked those. Have you milked your OGRE today?

Next, I got a length of 1/8" OD (outside diameter) styrene tubing from plastruct. A little experimentation showed that I could make a fairly nifty looking turret by cutting the end off, notching down about a 16th of an inch in two spots on one side and supergluing in a couple of lengths of the same wire as used for the antennae (honest, I'll get an exact measurement soon!), then filling the top of the turret with milliput and smoothing the edges. Sweet!

Now the nasty bit. I decided to put the turrets on the angles of the armor rather than the flats where the previous AP are. This means that they are 'stepped' with each one overlapping the one beneath it. Mark where you want the outermost turret to be and drill down with a smaller bit in your pin-vise, then enlarge that hole up to 1/8" with ever increasing size bits. Now do the innermost turret, and then the middle one. You'll end up with three turrets in a stepped pattern at each of the rear corners, and three at each of the outer front angles, then two more at the mid-point angles...This gives them more fire arc than where they were located previously. If you're gonna improve something, improve it!

I haven't finished doing this drilling yet, as it's tedious and painstaking work. Each time you drill one hole just right, the next becomes more worrisome because that's 'more work to do right if you have to start over'. Getting sixteen holes close enough to perfect by hand is a pain, I might try rigging a jig on the drill press... Anyhow, when I'm done, the lowermost turrets go in, then I'll cut the middle ones to the appropriate height, and finally the top turrets go in flush with the top deck. I'll fill any tiny gaps with milliput and finish building the OGRE, tack the treads on it, prime and paint. I hope.

PROJECT MOBILE COMMAND POST:
I've got an old PE missile crawler that's missing its missile and launch gantry, so I'm working on a 'trailer' for it which'll make a good D1 or so MCP. Right now I've got the rough measurements, and am making some sketches based off of a cross between Darrel Ralph's old resin CP and the hardened Midgetman launch vehicle testbed. I'll build the sloped sides by using small hex-nuts sawn in half with a dremel to brace polystyrene sheet in order to get those wonderful 60-degree facets of sloped BPC.

PROJECT GEV-CP:
I've also got an old PE GEV-PC that' missing its engines and has a molding bubble on the engine-mount which partly obscures the intake fan for the air cushion.

May as well think about mounting a nice faceted chassis on that, too...

PROJECT TRAIN:
Paired two-inch engines (one at each end) and a pair of two-inch 'cars'. Just beginning to fit this together, using hex-nuts for cross-section and with a vision something like the mating of a WW2 German armored train and one of Walt Disney's extremely nifty monorails. Right now I'm working on making just the engine for one end. I may be nutty enough to create (in addition to the alternate engines with cannon) a flatbed car or two that can carry heavy tanks. It shouldn't be too much more work.

MAGNATROOPERS:
I quickly decided that using the bases that came with the new SJG OGRE infantry was neat and crummy all at once. Neat because you could make a 1-base into a 2 or 3, or vice versa, quite easily. Crummy because in no time at all the paint and flock around the edges of the mini-stands and the little cavities they fit into got chipped and looked shoddy. Well, they're cheap enough that buying more and gluing up real 1-2-3 bases would be perfectly sensible, but I like being able to stack little individual minis on my heavy and superheavy tanks to represent squads 'riding'...And I liked the idea of the 'modular' bases.

Heaven help me, I'm an engineer. And not necessarily a sane one. I had a ton of magnetic business-card stick-ons lying around. One sleepless Tuesday night saw me chiseling out the center bit of a hole-saw, sticking the remainder into a drill press, and cutting little 7/8" magnetic circles. They aren't pretty. Yet. Now I need to knock the spikes off of a few dozen thumbtacks, superglue the infantry to the tops of the thumbtacks, and voila, magnetic infantry...

I told you I wasn't necessarily sane.

Neither myself nor Steve Jackson Games Incorporated may be held liable for any damages suffered to self, pets, miniatures, or major metropolitan areas by the appropriate or inappropriate use of powered or non-powered tools, solvents, adhesives, paints, or chihuahuas. These items are inherently hazardous and should not be used without appropriate precautions and adult supervision.