Hobby Update - Man of Intrigue

So first I pulled out the pictures from a previous post, just so I could have this process separate. 

The starting pile of bits that struck my fancy as I rooted through my stack of stuff. It includes doom wheel and warplightning parts, but also parts from my previously aborted blood angles army, scraps from the converyed steam tank and even a random part from my local shop's bits bin. 

Here is a pic of some dry fitting of the blood angle dreadnought parts as I try to figure out the feet. 

But first I feel that I have gotten a little ahead of myself. My goal with this project is really to make a unit filler for my upcoming Chaos Dwarf army. This piece will hold the place of 4 chaos dwarves with the halbred rifles. My idea is a psudo mech suit. I will also be using the model as my Man of Intrigue for WaaaghPACA. For the event what I need is a cool looking token-model, with little actual rules requirements.  Therefore my needs as a unit filler will dominate my desigh.

Youve already seen the feet, and I have an idea for the legs and driver. Currently, Im a little stumped on the front cage and army assembly. I know I want a 4 barrel  gatling gun, and have an idea of how to do it.

The rider will be a stormvermin, with an alternative head from the cannon crew. The hand with the skulls, when placed on will not longer have skulls. Not sure yet if I will just replace the hand or cut off the heads… I have removed the heads for aprevious  conversion. 

I have also started the platfrom he will be working on. Got that back on, but still have to figure out the front cage. 

For controlling the legs he will use hydraulic pressure. This bit is from the doom wheel kit and is originally hand pumped, not a foot peddle. As you can see I have removed the excess. 

For the hand controls, once I have figured out the arms, I have keypads from my recently destroyed dark eldar skimmer kits. 

With the body built a little, I wanted to move back to the legs so that I could have the supports assembled before the top got too heavy. Even though before I showed then together, they are still in facy 2 parts. 

All but the plastic card is from the blood angels dreadnought kit. The toes are actually claws.

When back and glued in the feet. Once that was done I tried to figure out how high I wanted it and decided on just over twice the height of a stormvermin, assuming the height of the existing platform is the talest part. This put the legs at around an inch and a half. Now there will be some angling on the legs, but also an added knee, so I figured the leg parts themselves wouldnt need to be much longer (that inch and a half factors in the feet as well). I didnt want it to look like it had stubby legs.

Haha, look, I can measure. 

I picked out this metal size because it slides right over the plastic tube i use for pinning. This will be the same size as the rotor pole on the airships.

Little dryfit:

And the second part of the leg:

Dryfitting caused me to change the angles on the lower legs a little. This way a little more white will show and hopefully give a better piston look. Also will lower it down a little more. I might have to trim a little off the metal legs as well.

Even after changing the angle I found it to be a little taller than I wanted. I also found the legs werent even close to even. So I made them a diaper and decided to cut them down. 

After that I had to walk away to wait for the feet to re-setup.