Kit Bash – The White Dwarf Way!

Back in the early to mid 80s, Plastic casting wasn’t a huge thing. There were a couple of reasons. There was a bit of an oil crisis which lead to many toys using diecast metal parts when it was going to be a large part instead of plastic cause it was far cheaper, and the fact that for plastic casting, you need some pretty pricey gear. Moulds are, for the most part, CNC tooled steel and injection casting machines aren’t cheap and if you have to use a third party, the doesn’t really decrease the costs. As a result, when Citadel tried out plastic figures, it was a pretty big deal for them. tooling for the moulds had problems which often resulted in slightly softer designs, along with the problems casting with Steel compared to rubber. Where a single piece figure in a rubber mould, cast in Metal, would allow some flexing so you could pop the figure out of the rubber, with a steel mould it is much harder to release and many of the same designs were simply not possible. This kinda lead to the ‘mono-pose’ figures. Plastics which were very limited in posing them. One good thing this lead to, or could be seen as a good thing, is multi-part figures which gave a greater, easier range of posing and were much easier to cast. They were, however, much harder to put together.

Games workshop still wanted to be able to do some larger stuff and even some items which couldn’t really logically be made (and be successful) with the standard metal casting.

Some of these items weren’t really new for citadel, card dungeon tiles for example, or even buildings. But sometimes, when Citadel released a plastic kit, such as the famous Rhino for 40K, they wanted to sell more kits and to do that, they gave people plans to kit bash them. Later on, most of these would be replaced with ‘upgrade’ kits, and new model releases which had the many of the same parts.

This is gonna be far from a complete list but is gonna be some interesting high lights

White Dwarf #103 showed some photos of what you could do with the new Rhino plastic kit and some plasticard (or card board), which is followed up in #104 with some templates.

These were two ‘scrap’ conversions shown, Rhino Conversion A added 25mm round slotta bases, Orc and fighter shields (orcs ones are a bit smaller) along with the odd bits of card, a pen top and pieces of sprue. Conversation B uses simpler pieces for a different look.

While both are clearly customised from the basic rhino kit, they are both Rhinos and can’t really mistake that fact that they are Rhinos.

After the range now included Land Raider, Rhino and Predator (an upgrade for the Rhino), the next big kit bash was for two whole new Vehicles.. and by whole new, I mean reasons to buy more of there kits. Issue #119 and #120 featured rules and conversation guide for the Spartan, which was the Terminator’s own Battle Tank, using parts of the Land Raider, Rhino and Plastic card and then the parts left over, with more plastic card could make the Imperial Tank Hunter.

As you can probably see from the images, the Tank hunter looks alot like a customised Rhino, in the same vein as the Predator, though slightly different enough from the two rhino conversation, While the Spartan looks alot like a Land raider with some extra bits.

Though its name changed a fair bit even to this day, Epic introduced a bunch more rhino conversations which, many of which would either get kit bash guides or/and official 40K kits. The Vindicator, The Whirlwind and without too much effort, the Manticore and Basilisk.

issue #128 gave conversations for the Ork Battlewagon, a new monstrously sized kit to make it into one with a Blitzkanon

Come #132 gave the guide for the Baneblade (another Tony Cottrell one) but this time it does not use the Rhino or any other kit as a base but completely scrap build. This showed a slight and short lived change and #136 gave the Ork Gobsmasha by Phil Lewis and Ivan Bartleet, which was another completely scratch build vehicle, though options for using some bits like from a rhino was always possible. They then gave some information and templates for other similar Ork machines like the Braincrusha, Bonecruncha and Lungbursta (which were originally from Epic).

However, before too long, once the 1990s had begun, plastic kits became far more common and Citadel released tons of them, often with some metal add-on bits (like for the Whirlwind, Vindicator etc). There was also, for 40K, a raise in the Metal body with Plastic arms figures.

Before too long, Citadel’s card days were pretty much behind them, bar the odd building, which they preferred to sell you pre-printed more then giving your the templates and guides for. OF course, they HAD done pre-printed card buildings before. Most of the WFB 2ed scenario packs came with card buildings (and figure proxies) which were later collected in Townscapes. But the days of how to make a new vehicle or kit bash one of their plastic kits had gone and more were the pre-made kits.

One thing I felt very funny a while back was GW sold a kit for some 40K vehicle who’s name escapes me and is probably past my time anyway, but the kit had various ‘upgrade’ options with it. So instead of the old day when they would either sell you a rhino and then you could buy an ‘upgrade kit’ for a predator, razorback etc, or without too long just released them as complete sets, you got one box which had all various upgrade options. It’s kinda like buying a rhino set which has the parts for the Predator, razorback, whirlwind, Vindicator etc in the same box. The price would be higher cause more parts but you would get some nice spares. well.. The kit would allow you to build one of the upgrade options and people started to swear up and down cause they wanted to use magnets so you could change the loadout for which version, but it was designed so you couldn’t… well.. I kinda understand that. I have a Razor back which I didn’t glue in the top door with turret and made up a rhino closed door so I could field it as either the Razorback OR the rhino (of course, I glued the front gun turrets so it would be an unarmed Rhino but oh well) but really.. why do they OWE you the luxury of selling you only one kit for you to use as more then one vehicle when you could buy more kits? as much as I’m not a fan of how GW is very… money hungry and is kinda screwing over small time gaming shops (oh, there is a story and a half) but they don’t OWE you the ability to make it as multiple loadouts. Even in this article which is saying about how White Dwarf would give you ‘free’ upgrade options for things like the Rhino, it does require you buy the Rhino kit each time.

Oh, I really do understand how it’s nice when you can cheap out. Why buy the model twice to get a build with both head options when you can add a magnet and just swap the head, but they don’t OWE you that option. anyway.. that’s a bit of a side track.

Looking through what I got, one thing I notice is the guides and templates were pretty much either buildings for Fantasy, or Vehicles for 40K. They didn’t really do vehicles for Fantasy, such as Steam tanks, Chariots or carts, which is a bit of a shame. of course, I might have missed some.