Fox Box

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  • Sale time! (11th – 18th April 2017)

    We don’t go on many holidays and they’re rarely anywhere glamorous. This time we’re heading to Wales to visit my parents. I know, that Instagram life I lead. Anyway, my folks always ask how things are going with the business and it’d be nice to be able to have a good moan about all the work I’m going to need to do when we get back!

    So to encourage that sort of thing we’re doing a sale on our stuff. As always that means things we make – Fox Box stuff. Not the plastic bitz, not TakUnderhand’s beautiful laser-cut acrylics, not the odds and ends in the Mek’z Speshul category. Just our stuff! That’s quite a lot of products these days, I’m proud to say.

    As the graphic below says the code to put in at checkout is “eggthingy2017”. Mmmm eggs…

    We run JigoShop as our ecommerce solution and have done since it was a fairly new bit of software. A little while back, a few months, something like that, they finally hit version 2.0. I don’t make a habit of upgrading production software until it’s been out a while just in case there’s some show-stopping bugs that haven’t been found yet.

    So when we get back from our holiday I’ll be tinkering with the software and doing my best to make sure everything is running smoothly. This could take a few hours, or it could take days. I have no idea – that’s one of the reasons I’ve been putting off doing it!

    I’ll also be revising our postage costs slightly as it’s now a new financial year and that means the Royal Mail have once again raised their prices. One more reason to get orders in before the sale ends!

    Now if only I could convince someone to buy me a chocolate egg. It’s been bloody years!

  • Not many miscasts now, I’m afraid.

    I love these things:

    Fox Box Orc Jerrycan with scale and a GW Ork Boy

    They’re great. Growing up I had tiny jerrycans that came with the old GW Ork Wartrukk model but they were puny even by the standards of the day. I’d dig one out and photograph it but just trust me – they were tiny. 28mm Heroic isn’t really a scale though so it’s difficult to get sizes right. Things like barrels are especially tricky given the bases the models stand on. We usually just fudge it and these jerry cans are no exception – they’d come up to chest height if that Ork was human!

    I’m really pleased with them but it has taken quite a while to bring them to market due to my own incompetence. Sometimes I finish masters for something and just can’t get them to cast right. It’s rarely a problem with the masters themselves – normally it’s how I’ve laid out the mould. I experiment fairly often when making new ones though and I’m always learning. Well, apart from when I’m not.

    Anyway, these seem to be casting happily now so that means I can soon fill my own builds up with cans. Next stop – kegs!

     

    Oh and you can buy the jerrycans here:

    http://fox-box.co.uk/product/fox-box-orc-jerrycans/

  • Riot Shield Retrospective?

    I should probably start doing blog posts every time we release a product, now I come to think about it. Maybe they’ll cover what’s new about the new thing, or something. Hmm. Well let’s give it a go and see where it takes us!

    So, most recent release, erm, yep, these things:

    Fox Box Orc Riot Shields 3.0 Fox Box Orc Riot Shields 3.0

    They’re the 3.0 iteration of our Orc Riot Shields. They’re improved in many ways but there’s still a fair bit of the originals from late 2012 in there. Has it really been that long?

    Since then they’ve hit 2.0 which saw the introduction of bludgeon arms to go with them (a pipe, a club with nails in it, and a barbed wire cudgel thingy). This latest version bumps it up to five designs of each. One of the shields uses an old phone card as part of its master. Back when I was getting into wargaming in ’98 plasticard (styrene sheeting) was damn near impossible to find near me. I’d just been sent off to boarding school and my boarding house had a pay phone that used these cards. I’d collect all I could find and use them to convert my Gorkamorka vehicles. No need to any more, of course, but there’s a few odds and ends still kicking about that still date back that far. The guy that runs a bitz shop is a bit of a pack rat? Alert the media!

    Also it’s the first time I’ve handled the photos this way. I’ve never managed to get ink to stick to raw resin so these are coated in the modern equivalent of Bleached Bone (I know, I’m old…) first. I’m fairly pleased with the result, frankly.

    Bringing them up to five also makes it easier to equip units with them. I’m planning on using a couple of sets for my 40K Orks!

  • How to assemble our Orc Pickup Truck

    Something I’m not all that good at is instructions on how to assemble the kits we sell. Normally I figure this isn’t a problem but in the run up to the release of our Pickup Truck kit I gave a few copies away to see how they’d go down. Whilst people loved them images like this made me reckon that maybe some guidance would be helpful…

    Mike's admirable attempt!
    Mike’s admirable attempt

    So I’ve filmed something that’ll hopefully clear up any questions you guys might have 😀

  • Sculpting Da Monster

    Roughly every month YakTribe has a competition of some sort. The most recent one, competition 13, has been centred on the theme “It came from the…”

    Make / Paint a Monster or some Monsters – this is our first ever dedicated monsters competition too, so we’re hoping for some really creative entries.

    Ideas: Some kind of ‘It came from the sump’ scenario, wandering monsters, summons or perhaps something a little more mysterious.

    There is no minimum or maximum base size or min / max numbers for this.
    Usual games apply – Necro, GoMo, Mordheim (& FG), INQ28.
    Again, you have 6 weeks to get your final entries in – closing will be T̶h̶u̶r̶s̶d̶a̶y̶ ̶5̶t̶h̶ ̶M̶a̶y̶ Monday 9th May (due to Holiday Weekends :)🙂 ).

    I’ve entered before but in recent months I’ve been fairly busy. Well for once there was a gap in my schedule – we’re about to move house and so I’m trying to pack away bigger work projects (there’s quite a few!) and just work on small things. I figured a competition entry would be a fun change of pace and so got stuck in.

    A fair few years back we put together a scenario called “Frankenork” featuring a create so disgustingly unorky that it could not be allowed to live. It didn’t even have an interest in fighting!

    Clayton Tait drew some beautiful artwork to go with it:

    Clayton Tait’s vision of “Da Monster”

    So for the competition I set to work creating a 3D version!

    It started with some miscast bits…
    The legs were quickly coated in green stuff.
    Next up – a guideline head (It’s a modified version of the Snow Stinger rider’s head)
    Just like the legs the torso, head, and guide arm were all completely obscured by putty.
    The arms were done like this – a miscast arm with some armature wire inserted followed by putty.
    The armature wires vanish under layers of kneadatite!
    Let’s get some muscle on there!
    Time for some gizmos and cables.
    Once firmly set they could then be curled into his back and blended in.
    Details are important – note the staples on his left arm and the stitches on his chest and cranium.
    Once the arms were removed I was able to get in there and sort out details on his palms as well as a few other areas much more easily.
    Given that I’d like to use the model as a basis for other projects a cast seemed sensible! Some details were added before this but I don’t have a photo of those (notably the shackles and chain links).
    I squished his shoulder a little when I hastily pulled it from the mould. Oops!
    Done!
    As you can see – this guy is *big*!

    Want a better look at him? Take a look at the video below: