Benjamin's Chariots 🛒 - THE IRON CLAWS - Wildcard Month (448pts)

You can hide, but you can't run!

Oh boy has this been a long time in the works! Scouring through my photos the initial stages go back to at least August last year - but the thought of an Iron Claw chariot with an Olley Beastmen was far earlier. This is probably the most overly worked bit of the army so far - and seeing it finished finally feels like a real gift!

The Beastmen Chariots

A true 20th Century Design Icon

The Iron Claw chariot feels like the purest Bob Olley experience. That intense dragon figurehead, and all those gaping square jaws. Like the beastmen he did for citadel, it really captures the spirit of classic warhammer, whilst also not entirely really fitting in. Like a glimpse into a parallel universe where he might have worked a bit more with them.

It took AGES to finally acquire one for myself - however that was only the beginning of the process really.

The Challenges...

I really wanted them to be pulled by boars to fit into the demake logic the army has. Despite sculpting for every company out there - to my knowledge Bob had never sculpted a boar. So I had to cheat and use ones sculpted by Kev Adams. He DID however sculpt a Boar Head for this guy

Don't let me boar you to death with all this

The chariot itself was also a bit short - so incorporating this into the Beastmen army required a bit of a boost. The proportions of the goblins were just too short - so I opted to create a lasercut replica, and allow for press moulded sections to replace the missing details.

An early photoshop mockup

Some cad designs for the laercutter

An eager prototype!

Much of the lasercut stuff got swapped and resculpted later on. I extended the winged panels a bit on the sides and the fronts were heavily altered. The initial plan to just do one kind of ballooned to four due to the availability of free press-moulded components.

To avoid too much repetition I needed to source various components for variation - this included some goat heads (Ral Partha Dwarf Cavalry) to replace the dragon figureheads, and various press moulded bits on the fronts. A happy accident of extending it's height was to sculpt jaws onto the skull fronts.

The Riders were initially going to be from the Midlam Miniatures goatmen range - but they just seemed too skinny in such a bulky chariot. So they were swapped out for very heavily converted Gargantua orcs from Ral Partha. This decision alone really added a few weeks to the whole project.

Cool points if you can guess the donor model for the whip guys.

Painting...

Aside from needing a magic brush to access some of the crevices in the riders - painting was fairly straightforward - although I was a little stumped with how to paint the chariots. Each model is pretty much it's own unit at this point - so there's a fine line between bland and busy that I've tried to keep between!

April 30th, and the varnish is still wet.

Points...

I was a little creative with the points - using WHFB 3rd edition rulebook to build a chariot from scratch.

They're 112 points each - so altogether 448pts.

Next month will be MORE rank and file, and a shrine - and hopefully those beastmen that didn't get finished in February! And a wizard. And another Korag too.

Thanks for reading!