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Giant Stompy Robots!
I saw this action figure on Amazon for about $5, so I figured how bad could it be?
For cheap, it should make some nice conversion fodder. Well, I was pleasantly
shocked (not just surprised, but shocked) when I got it. The entire thing comes
apart to base pieces with just a phillips head jewler's screwdriver! No cutting,
filing, prying, bending, sawing. I think I will go back and get several more
and start in to swapping out arms, legs, and redoing about anything else. But for
now ... on to the giant steampunk robots!
So, after I removed the push-button light from the inside (I'm sure I'll find a good use for it sometime), the hollow inside is plenty big enough for a figure. I did some test fitting with various amounts of paper wadding to adjust the standing height for the "driver". With a figure in it, it hardly needs anything else to make a nice steampunk stomp-bot. However, in steampunk, anything worth doing is worth overdoing!
Quick tip ... I covered the label and TM data with a piece of strapping tape. Most
people won't look at the butt of a piece like this, but if you are driving it, you
are likely to be looking at its backside for quite a bit. Best to hide it.
Now, it's time to slap a bunch of nick-nacks on on the robots to steampunk them up. Cardboard decorations, toothpick spikes, and drinking straw exhaust pipes are stock-in-trade parts of the genre. As are my favourite part - rivets. I used the good old liquid latex (you get it in craft stores to do decoration on t-shirts) to rivet these boys up. I also think the tractor feeds from the ancient computer paper are an easy way to add some steampunk flavour.
I went with a basic steel and brass motif, only adding a little blue and green
highlights (done with ink over silver paint). Since the base colors are metallic
paints, I went ahead and used two layers of matte finish to seal them. I think
this gives them a softer metallic look.
The reds and greys shown are EM4/Grenadier space marines, which are a standard
~28mm sci-fi figure. I think they look equally well with the helm down or up
(yes, yes, not practical in combat, but Dr. Meh's cat doesn't like confined
spaces, and Delilah likes to look around.
