So,... you into leather?

I promised that I would tell you guys a little more about the work I do for Alliance LARP. About 5 or 6 years ago my girl friend had been taken to play the live action role playing game (at that time called NERO, now called Alliance). She had a great time and loved it; and there for I gave it a shot.
She had gone all out and bought a nice set of leather armor from some site online for about $400. I was surprised at the cost and decided to make a suit of leather armor for my character by learning how to do it myself.
I went to the local Tandy Leather Factory here in Harrisburg, Pa. They were great and helped to answer my questions about how to work and tool leather and the suit of armor in the left side was my first suit of armor for Alliance.
Since then, I have become much more active in the game and I have gone on to make myself a second suit of armor for myself. I am much happier with the second suit and I think It looks infinitely better than my first basic suit of leather. The original edition (MK I) was colored, but still rather plain. The newer suit (MKII) has embossed scales in each of the plates and I highlighted and shaded the scales and felt that this design is just as maneuverable as the previous set and both sets of leather armor have been silenced so they make virtually no noise at all. (leather armor normally sounds like a tall tree creaking in the wind with the slightest movement and very un-sneaky).
This new set has extra pockets set into the armor for all manner of cool rogue gear. (Batman would be proud) It is also really comfortable and I am very happy with the new set of armor. Yep I am even nerdier than a blogging modeler. And I would not have it any other way. - Bossman

A bit more of the pre-heresy

Well here we are for another installment of the bitz box. A friend of mine had seen the suggestion about pre-heresy jump / flight packs. He went on and on about how we could probably use the thrust stabilizers from a Drop pod or Valkyrie model. So I was given the task of seeing what could be done. So I didnt have any extra stabilizers floating about at this time, so I had to resort to making a 1 part cast of a stabilizer from of one of my waiting kits.
After the casts came out I took a standard Space Marine Jump Pack and sawed off the two frontal intakes and a bit of the center portion of the pack as well. (I needed a lot of space for those intakes!)
After the pack was cut up, I inset the stabilizer fans onto the top of each jet. I green stuffed the pack to fill in the gaps made by my cuts and I used a tube part from the interior harness from a drop pod (I don't use all of them) to help make the "turbo-fans" look a little more archaic.
All in all I am thinking that this is not a bad conversion for the concept, but I am not sure that I like the degree of inset that the fans are facing on the top. But the look seems to fit well for the pre-heresy look that so many people are making nowadays.
I would love to see GW make a themed book on the Heresy. It would be fantastic to be canon on this one. If you know of another conversion idea for making old school jump packs, please let me know :)

- Bossman, Out!

I have been quite busy

Hi All. I have been remiss in my duties of blogging on the internet due to the affairs of many obligations and not enough time to do it all.

For the store we have been doing a lot of spring cleaning. I have been working on a news letter for the store called "This week at the Guild" where I promote the events at the store, local gaming clubs, conventions, a classified section. Since I am the guy to produce the layout, design, and artwork for it; means that bossman is kept very busy.

The monstrosity pictured to your left is the result of another one of my obligations. I participate in a Live Action Role Play Organization called "Alliance" and for the first two years I simply donated a mess of stuff that they could use for their props department. Since then (3 years ago) they made me their "head of props".

The Alliance chapter (HQ) located in northern PA is the chapter I work with and it is rather challenging and I normally do not enough time to make the bigger stuff that they need. This monstrosity is one of those last minute things that I have dropped into my lap. I had one week to complete an obelisk that would be H.R. Geiger inspired. It was to be four ft. tall and about 24" across at it's base.

I created the piece to look like a veritable hodge-podge of different things all of which is organic in nature. The entire structure is made of pink insulation foam. (You know the stuff we normally make terrain out of). The foam was cut and shaped a little before the entire surface was treated with a blow torch. (this makes the surface burn away a little and become very organic is appearance. (Veins appear and all sorts of neat pollups come forth from the surface of the foam) The heat treating also plasticized the surface making it much more durable.

After the heat treating, I used expanding foam to make cancerous bulbs on the surface and if you do it just right you can also string it out to make it look like intestines. pool noodles were stripped down and made to look like arteries over the surface and a nice serene face was "grown" into the side of surface as well. (very off putting!)

Once the goodies were done being put on my sculpture. The surface was painted with latex paint and then special areas were treated with colored spray paint to help accentuate interesting, um... bitz. The bright arterial red gloss spray paint did wonders for the overall appearance. And this was part of what I have been working on instead of my zeppelins... I will have more of the stuff I have been contracted to do as well, and hopefully, I will be able to get back to my zeppelins in the next week or so. :P (I need to have less obligations) Until next time!
- Bossman