Scratch building gretchin pistols WIP

I’ve got a bunch of old fantasy WH goblins, a couple games under my belt running some One Page Rules “Orc Clans”, and a moderate interest in scratch building some 40k proxies to use with my friends. None of what I use will be legal for 40k games, which is fine; I don’t plan to play tournaments and might not even play 40k proper. But I do like OPR, and it’s an excuse to play around. So! I chopped up about half the WH fantasy goblin models I have and glued homemade gretchin guns to ’em. Once they’re painted up they’ll be perfectly suitable for two 10-model units of gretchin in armies or 3-model units in skirmish games.

If I had a bucket of styrene like a real boy, this would have been easier to cut and glue. As it was I had a range of wooden dowels, toothpicks, a couple of paper-thin styrene For Sale signs, and some leftover 1/8″ puckboard from… I think a cosplay project five or ten years ago? Anyway, the puckboard was the right thickness for pistol bodies that had cut-outs that’d split the wood I was using, but not only did it not react to plastic glue it sort of laughed at super glue. It’s holding well enough now, thanks to sanding, except that I needed to pin the special weapon “giant revolver” cannon together, and to the hand of the poor gretchin that needs to drag it across the battlefield.

The revolver got the characteristic divots in the cylinder by using a busted old leather hole punch at a 45 degree angle. An old bulk purchase of plastic earring posts chopped up into ejector rods, and the ends of toothpicks worked pretty good for hammers on both the revolvers and zip guns. Zip gun bodies were chopped up paint stir sticks with some styrene sheet greeblies, and two toothpick lengths glued into what I think are called french hook earring backs from a bag of loose parts my wife’s been collecting since she was 13, for the same reason I’m constitutionally unable to throw out a DC power cord or networking cable. Lots of tweezers and cursing and superglue. I think I like the revolvers best, but variety is important and the revolvers were about twice as much work as the zip guns or scatter guns.

I finished off with a trio of “special weapons” just in case I upgrade gretchins for no reason besides having 5 points to spend and nothing useful to spend them on. Very Large Revolver, Very Large Scattergun Or Maybe Bazooka, and Very Large That’s A Lot Of Rods, Maybe A Laser? Anyway, it’s ork tech, it looks like garbage and runs on the power of imagination, which is fantastic because that’s about the level my scratch building can reach.

I’ve got all 20 gretchins glued up, mold scraped, primed, and the green flesh based with ink over a zenithal. I’ll post them finished this week, I expect.