Thursday, July 19, 2012

Kor'Sarro Khan riding on Moondrakkan

  Here are some pics of my current Work-In-Progress Kor'Sarro Khan riding on Moondrakkan.
Kor'Sarro Khan with Moonfang riding Moondrakkan right side
Kor'Sarro Khan with Moonfang riding Moondrakkan left side
 I wanted to make my own version of Moondrakkan, since Games Workshop didn't seem like they were in any hurry to put one out of their own.  There were a lot of very nice characters on bikes out there to find pictures of on the internet, but none that I saw and really liked. First off, It's named Moondrakkan, for crying out loud, so my best guess is the 4th Master of the Hunt chopped the head off some great beast and said, "I'm so proud of chopping this things head off that I'm keeping this Mutha!...Artificers! Put this on my new bike!" In my imagination, it needed to be more ornate than a normal bike, and it should at least in part pay homage to the original Bikes from the early days of 40K when I started playing.  It can run in the shooting phase, which to me means it is more of a hot rod than a normal bike, so it would be wider and longer and the engine has more power than a normal bike. I tried to build all that in when I was working on it and as the idea fleshed out.  I'm sorry that some of these pics suck, but you'll get the idea. I started with the bike, a toy dragon and some Kneadatite Green Stuff.
Moondragon Mk1



It looked ok, but then I realized it had no bolters, so off came the front fender...




Moondragon Mk2
...and I added the bolters from an old school Rhino tank.  On the original OOP lead 40k bikes the bolters were mounted on the front wheel, on the current plastic bike they are up high at the handlebars, so I went in between, just under the head.  Since I had ripped the front forks off with the fender, I was attempting to replace them with sprue and tube, so I drilled holes and set bits of wire in, but then, I scrapped that idea entirely for pieces from a Necromunda bulkhead. I added the clipped off and shaved down power blade things from a Chaos biker to the front end and added some horns made of Green Stuff. And there it sat for months, untouched, unloved and abandoned.  I had run out of ideas.

Vroom-Vroom!
   A week ago I ripped it all apart, starting again with a relatively clean bike (it had the back end wrecked). I split it back apart and added plasticard down the middle to widen it slightly and added the bigger tire on the rear that the Chaplain gave me, I saw online where someone made a "Steppenwolf" Akira style bike and I really liked the look of using the top hatches off the old Rhino tank kit as armored plating for the back wheel so I did that too. I added another set of pipes from the engine to the back and changed the exhaust from the standard to MultiMelta barrels, so instead of two on each side it has three, and turned them up slightly for a sportier look.  Later I drilled out the plastic axle and inset the little axle hubs from the biker sprue on both sides.
OH! Think of the speeding tickets!








   I found a chaos backpack reactor that looked a bit like a supercharger intake so I cut that off and mated it on the front end of the engine, Green Stuffing it in.  I set magnets in Kor'Sarro's feet and in the armored plate on the bottom, and also in the front of the bike and the head/front end as well.


 I rebuilt the back end and fender with Green Stuff, plasticard and parts from a model airplane kit. I sawed a MultiMelta in half down the middle and glued that to the bottom to cover the gap between the now widened armored plate and the rear wheel.



Moondrakkan bottom view
Really Bad and Fuzzy Pic of the front end Moondrakkan
  The current Land Raider has an Aquila every so often in the tread and taking another nod to the original bike, which has studs down the middle of the tire, I tried to sculpt Aquila's for the tread pattern.  I failed.  Then I saw all the Marine Sgt. banner poles in my bits box and got an idea.  I sawed one in half down the middle giving me two pretty little winged skulls which I glued to the tire to make the new tread.
The idea for the fangs I got from a combination of the Predator movies and the scary Mammoth things from Lord of the Rings.  I debated building my own Kor'Sarro out of parts, but eventually I caved in and bought Kor'Sarro from the local Bunker.  Man, I was disappointed in the quality of the model. Both feet and the left leg and shoulder had quite a bit of bubbles on the surface and the sword is so plain it doesn't look like anything you would picture in your imagination when someone tells you that the sword is named Moonfang. His left shoulder pad had to be replaced with a look alike from the Space Marine Commander box. I chopped him all up, and repositioned him on the bike, gave him a Green Stuff fur cape and got his back banner pole together last night using the picture in the codex as my guide. As for Moonfang, I was going to use a cobbled together Mephiston sword, but the Chaplain again came to my rescue and  gave me a two handed Blood Angel Relic blade that I modified leaving the repositioned right arm. I wanted to mate up the hilt of the Blood Angel Relic blade to the blade from Mephiston's sword just after the power weapon leads.  Usually I am really good at drilling and pinning things by hand, but this time I drilled crooked for my pilot hole and the drill bit walked out on the wrong side.  You can see the pin as it is exposed on the surface in the top pic.  The Blood drop I shaved off and replaced with a Green Stuff lightning bolt.  In the end it is very similar to the one in the picture in the codex.  It's not the same, but my version of the blade has that crescent shape which to me feels more like a 'Moonfang' than the one from the Finecast model.

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