As we ended the last article the team was “complete” but you hadn't seen the doom diver yet. We'll let me tell you a sad tale…

The 'diver was converted out of a Gnoblar that is supposed to be being dragged along by his feet from an ogres belt. Rotated 180 and modelled suitably he matched my vision for a 'landing' goblin. Well in your experience how do gobbos thrown by a troll usually land? Some broken planks were added to look like he had fallen from his contraption and smashed through some bleachers. Slowly, painstakingly, a tiny kite was built for him and he sat on a shelf for a few months. On the fateful day of his undercoating I was too lazy to go outside and simply leant out of the window to spray him. As I withdrew back into the room the paperclip joint failed me and away the kite tumbled. It lives in the no-mans land behind my flat now with the trains and foxes.

RIP little kite

So this time round a slightly different tack; here is a rough step by step guide how I built a replacement kite.

Ingredients for a not very tasty cake

The kite is built from cocktail sticks, some thick foil and brass picture wire. This time round I am also using a flight stand so I don’t have to rely on the wire for support. I’m old school so I remember the time that White Dwarf would recommend saving the tubes of tomato puree or similar to use for realistic standards & banners. The thick foil on these is perfect for cloth with movement where paper doesn't cut it.

To start two cocktail sticks have notches cut out so that they join nicely and have some contact area for gluing. These are then used for marking the size of foil needed, lightly scored with the back of a knife.

The foil is then cut out with a little extra bleed area. Notches are cut out the corners and the bleed folded over against a straight edge with a knife blade. The previous kite had spikes added from the bits box, you need to be spiky in case you land on a man. This time I whittled the ends with a knife for a more ramshackle look.

The next step is to try and make the kite look like it has actually been built in world. I chose the awkward way of doing it as I didn't trust my greenstuff skills for making ropes. The crossed sticks were “bound” by some brass picture wire which was twisted extra tight and adhered out of sight with superglue. An incision is made at the top to poke the front spike through. Using this as a guide small holes were made in the foil to loop more wire through as if it was tied on. These are then wound around the sticks to include hand holds for the gobbo to hang onto.

For the tail something more robust is required for the aesthetics. A paperclip is glued in place to provide a guide for the rope and then more wire wrapped around the kite and then tight onto that. You may see in the background I tried making some small bows to insert into the tail but they were hard to make and looked bad.

To make the piece playable I wanted the kite to be removable for when the ‘diver was prone or stunned. Previously this was done by having the paperclip in the tail inserted into a small hole with an adjacent magnet, but as you can imagine I didn't trust this any further. A clear flight stand was trimmed and the hole bored out to accommodate on the base. This was then coated in vaseline and greenstuff moulded around the peg. This allows the creation of a tight fit without binding the stand to the base and is more robust than before.

The kite is then attached to the flight stand (temporarily with blue tack until painted) and the tail bent to taste. The Bald Eagle is now ready to take to the skies and score some sweet sweet 1TTDs.

When building the team the first time I also used the swathe of baggage runts that I got as reroll and bribe markers. I even converted all the backpack gnoblars to be unique. 12 months later though I've fallen out of love with them so some drastic action is needed.

Plastic for the plastic god!

The only element of the minis I liked was the gnoblars themselves so the trusty saw was employed, but what to replace the bags with? What better to represent rerolls than the cursed objects that cause them. Once you play tabletop semi regularly you will collect dice like my son collects Pokemon, Gotta roll em all! Some of the spares I own were to be redeployed. With the tops of the bags lopped off I then tidied the edges to remove any residual bag, leaving just a cloth section. Greenstuff was once again employed in multiple layers to build up a platform on the gobbos backs. Once happy it was wide enough small ledges were made to hold the dice and integrate them into the model.

London leagues represent: BBBL, DBL, Pearlies Tournament, ECBBL

With that the 23 models of the team truly are complete. The other runts as bribes were binned (to the bits box, I'm not an animal) and an alternative more generic option will be constructed at another time. Once the painting is complete I'll update with some final team images and we can move onto the next project (this is a lie, I always have at least 3 running simultaneously)!