Scratch-Building a Baneblade Tank

After finishing up my Battle-Egg scratch build, I was itching for a new project to sink my teeth into. I reached out to folks at my FLGS, and one of the people there was interested in collaborating on something they'd wanted for a bit - A Baneblade tank. It's a new type of building for me: Smooth surfaces, hard angles, and solid construction. I was excited, and got to work!

I was given the plans by my collaborator, but I was able to find a copy of them here. I started planning out the build - there are a few missing measurements and some unclear instructions in there, and I started out with a few stumbles. I began constructing a nonsensical structure, got annoyed, and had to start over.

My second try things came together a bit more cleanly. I used thin cardboard cut very precisely with a sharp x-acto blade, and put together parts with a hot glue gun and a 90° angle square to keep the build precise and rectangular. I built out the front hull, adding the control bunker and rear hull. Then, I attached the left and right track guards, and built up the sponson on those.

During the build, I added mod-podge and black paint primer, and a cheap textured spackle paste to gap fill where needed. I regularly sanded this down, and repainted over with the black primer mix, attempting to get nice flat panels and sharp angular joins. It was sort of successful; the glue and corrugation stymied me from getting perfectly flat panels.

Since this was a collaboration, I only constructed the main chassis of the vehicle, and didn't finish of the any of the detailing, tracks, or turrets - those I left to my friend! So here's the final result that I handed off. I went hard on the texture paste on the panels, then sanded them down. I think it did a decent job of hiding the corrugation in the end (visible lines on the top turret hull notwithstanding, it's going to be covered with a turret). It accidentally gave it a very casted-metal look, as if the whole thing is built out of slags of pig iron or something. I think it looks pretty cool.

I'm so glad I was able to help out folks in my community, I had a lot of fun building it, and I can't wait to see what it's going to look like all finished up, detailed, and painted!

Thanks for reading!

- Miss Captain Bear