THE OFFICIAL WEBSITE OF THE HAMMER’S SLAMMERS THE CRUCIBLE RULES SYSTEM HANDBOOK

The plenum chamber: After the silver coat for the hull and turret is applied, next up are the ‘skirts’ - actually the steel plenum chamber that he fans blow into (this is a ‘blower’ after all, not an ACV or ‘Hover’). When I originally designed these vehicles I had intended to paint the skirts and that’s how I had potrayed them earlier on, both graphically and in models - usually with an “army green” skirt. However, David Drake said that he wanted them to look very rusty as the steel would soon corrode and any paint would be torn off them by pushing through the terrain so - since then - I have largely painted them as unprotected steel with the odd ‘replacement’ panel in newer looking steel colours, although I still paint the odd panel in an olive drab type colour (different suppliers or something) just for variation. Masking On the 6mm scale vehicle I paint these in by hand (usually choosing a mid brown like Army Painter Monster Brown) but on larger vehicle scales I generally mask off the silver work and spray them. You can see that technique below or in earlier paint jobs on the M2 Blower tanks and Combat Cars in this scale. Adding Stowage After peeling off the masking tape the next job is adding some bits and pieces to the model to make them look ‘lived in’. This was done using both ‘green-stiff’ putty to make tarps via the usual method of rolling out a flat piece and then - prototypically - then re-rolling it into a tube or laying it flat over a suitable area (like the turret rear). Stowage is almost all from the Brigade range, selected from my ‘bits box’ which I had previously painted ‘en masse’ by spraying a whole bunch of it.

Painting the M53 “Hog” from Ainsty in 1/100th