I Spy With My Beady Eye...

Hi, All!

The Nefarious Doktor Nefarious surveys the ruins of Ah-Pul-Sh'Napps with his towering automated bodyguard.

Coming from a long and proud military heritage as I possibly do, I often find it impossible to resist the urge to rummage through boxes of brightly coloured plastic beads.

If any of you are Sandhurst men, I'm sure you understand...

Beads, Sir. Dozens of 'em.

Anyway, I was cheerfully rummaging away the other day, intermittently humming 'Rule Britannia' and having a delightful conversation with myself about the shocking price of cheese these days (as one does) when I gasped in astonishment!

"Gasp! I'm astonished!" I gasped astonishedly, "That there pink beady-thingy looks exactly like the torso of one of those late nineteenth-century steam-driven self-motorvating legionnaries what gave our lads such a hard time!"

And of course, I was right. Keep reading - I can prove it.

The 'torso' beads are trimmed into shape to create a neck line, and abdomen and hip beads are attached. Neck pins are shoved into heads...

And so, I present to you another of The Nefarious Machinations of the Nefarious Doktor Nefarious...

The Legion of Steam-Driven War-tomata!

(not to be confused with your salad.)

3.2mm square tube is cut to create leg sections, jointed with tiny round beads.

This little gang was a nice distraction from Lord Smudgington Smythely-Smythe's Hydraulically-Motorvated Sextupedal Land-Traversing Vacational Domicile (more on that very soon) and were also super cheap to create.

Trangular sections are cut from square tube to create the feet. The squad is glued to washers, with packing under some feet to support action poses.

As you can see, I used little round beads for all of the joints. By so doing, I gave myself limitless options for poses. I wanted the unit to look dynamic and active - not your typical rigid robot-soldier poses.

Rivets and rods are added to 'flesh out' the legs. The same detailing will be added to the arms. The hips are armoured with plastic tube.

Arms are added, and shoulder armour is cut from round plastic tube.

These were fast and fun to build, although making ten of them for the sake of fielding a full squad was almost a drag at times.The lengths of plastic rod lining the arms and legs were the trickiest and most time-consuming part but they really bulk up the models.

Ray guns are put together from 1mm plastic rod, diamond-shaped beads and tiny rouns ones. Model-making doesn't get simpler than this!

'Hands' in place. The models are almost finished.

I wondered about hands, and decided to go for a simple claw on one arm and ray gun on the other. After all, these are supposed to be Victorianised Retro-Robots... Whatever those might be!

A finished War-tomaton, ready for painting. The crest on his head is a slice of plastic tube, cut open and stretched into place.

Centurion (note ribbed shoulder and diamond-emblem on his head); NCO (round emblem on head); and Legionary. The chimneys (and boilers) were made from plastic tube and a tubular bead.

I think these do rather well as 1960s-style robots with a VSF twist anyway.

The Centurion.

NCO (left) and Legionary (right)

The finished unit was given a simple paint job of copper with gold details, green eyes and red ray guns. Easy!

The completed unit, ready to smash all who stand in their way!

So there you go: Fast, Cheap, Simple and Dangerous!

The Nefarious Doktor Nefarious leads his warriors to assured victory.

Next post: More on Lord Smudgington Smythely-Smythe's Hydraulically-Motorvated Sextupedal Land-Traversing Vacational Domicile (... I'm really getting bored of typing that...) and TWO more super-duper-secret side projects coming soon!

All the Best!