Mek Lab - Big Mek with Shokk Attack Gun

He's hard at work, trying to appease the insatiable appetite of Warboss Chainsaw - the hunger for more units to use in his WAAAGH!

Without further ado, let's turn the time over to Mek Gearsnik:

"The las' Big Mek dat borrowed me lab didna tighten' the kno'wots on hiz shokk attack gun.  Wood 'e listen to ol' Gearsnik?  Nah!  So he gotz hizself blowd up, o' courz.  Da dum sod!  Dis made Chainsaw mad 'nd we can't have dat.  Taday we're gonna build a proppa shokk attack gun and I suppoze we'll need to make a cybork Big Mek ta carry it 'round az well - I heard dat de last fella ate a hot rokkit fer breckfast.  Whal, dat iz no way ta live...  Get it?  Har-har-har!"

Big Mek with Shokk Attack Gun

See the amazing transformation of a few ork model bitz, some random junkyard scrap, and a whole lotta' crazy inventiveness into something alien and rude.  One of the most feared weapons that the ork horde can bring to bear: A Shokk Attack Gun wielding Big Mek!

Construction Steps

Step 1 - Assemble Bitz

The model's most basic components will be a Marvel Heroclix figure (Mister Hyde), a cybork nob head, and some spare arms from a boyz kit.

We will need to do a fair bit of work on even these pieces before the hideous vision I see in my twisted mind's eye comes to fruition!

Then I open my storage boxes full of bitz, odds and ends, and crafty supplies. I'm not exactly sure at this point what I'm going to need, so I just spread the junk out before me to serve as a sort of junkyard muse...

For sure I'll be using three plugs from a 1/4" sprinkler tube system for the primers of the gun, plenty of wire, and some cotton cloth.

Step 2 - Chop up Bitz

The miniature components get my attention first.

The body is popped off the large Heroclix base, then the feet are cut loose and trimmed using a razor blade.  Next I cut off both arms and trim the head down to what will become the creature's neck.  The arms take a lot of work with my smallest rotary drill bit to carve out up underneath the shoulder wrap.  It takes more than a hour of careful carving and fitting to hollow out two spaces where the arms will fit snugly at the shoulders.

The nob head has this bizarre exhaust pipe coming out of the side of his head and I'm thinking that would look hilarious if it were hollowed out into the ork's skull.  Humor is one of the best things about my greenskin army, after all.  So I carefully drill the middle of the pipe out and it looks pretty good.

The gun arm is left alone for now, but the axe-wielding arm gets chopped up.  The handle of the axe is cut to be just a pipe and the fist is cut off from the arm so I can rotate it.

Step 3 - Assemble Both Ends of the Gun

Many different components go into making the business end of the shokk attack gun.

The base is a small bit of plastic tubing.  Inside this is an even smaller plastic tube.  Inside that is a very small piece of Qtip tube that I pushed further in.  And finally, the sharp end of a toothpick is in the center.

The primer arms are the plug portion of three 1/4" sprinkler plugs that I cut off from their finger grips.  I use my pin vice to drill out small holes in the center of each angled end and glue in 3 incredible small gold pins that I salvaged from a busted inkjet printer head.  Using a razor blade, I cut out three holes attempting to roughly make the holes 120 degrees from each other.  My estimate turns out pretty spot-on!

The entire assemble gets super glued into place.

The other end of the shokk attack gun is more frightening to the ammo: dull-witted and slow snotlings!  The gun creates a vacuum into the warp and this end needs to look like a scoop to suck up the squealing projectiles.

I cut out a section of a plastic milk jug into the shape of the scoop because I need it to be flexible, but look like sheet metal later.  Of course, I put some jagged blades on the end, because that's the way orks roll.

A section of plastic tube (of a smaller diameter than what I used for the gun body) will hold the cloth tube into place later, so I fit a test chunk of tube in place to make sure everything will fit.

Small holes are cut into the ends of the plastic and I cut some very thin sections of clothesline to form small plastic washers on both the inside and outside of the scoop.  At this stage I do not glue this into place as I may need to rotate the handle to the proper position once the full model is assembled.

Step 4 - Assemble the Middle of the Gun

Now the gun arm and the middle bits get built.  In order to hold the shokk attack gun body in place, I cut a notch into the middle of the pistol that will allow the back end of the tube to slide into it.  This snug fit will hold the gun barrel in place.

A small half-cylinder of plastic is added to one side to bulk up the rear of the gun and provide another opening.


This gun is going to look fairly heavy, especially on the far end of the barrel, so I cut a small chunk of plastic into a elbow pad and use wire to attach it as a support on the upper arm for the supposed weight of the weapon.

As the snotling reaches to top of the tube, it gets sucked through a warp portal generated inside it.  This strange device is represented by a squared plastic bead.

A long section of thin wire is coiled, then crimped into a bundle of cables.  A thin strip of masking tape is used to form a wrap of some kind that is holding the wires together.

The control and power wires that allow the gunner to select where the other end of this tunnel into hyperspace exits goes from this bead to several openings I drilled or used from the tubes on the end of the gun.

Step 5 - Stage 1 Painting

At this time, I need to take a break from my fever-induced construction to paint the parts of the model that I have finished so far.

I'll need to put the model together soon and once it is glued, it will be difficult to reach all of the different areas of the fellow with a brush.

First step is to prime all of my bitz!  A flat black is perfect for me.

Next I paint all of the parts to the best of my limited ability.  I'm not exactly happy with the low-level of detail on the body, but I figure that the massive and strange shokk attack gun is what people are going to be focusing on - so who cares!

In the photo, you can see that I painted half of three pinheads that I pulled off some quilting pins.  These will be attached onto the small gold pins on the primers of the weapon later.

Also, you can see the parts that will form the first section of the tube: a small ring of plastic tube and a scrap of cotton fabric.

But before I can get to that, I need to start putting this guy together!

Step 6 - Partial Assembly

The first arm is difficult to get into place since the warp converted box and the shoulder of the arm are a pretty tight fit.  Eventually it's in place and looks correct.

The pinheads are carefully glued into place on each of the gold pins.

At this point, I superglue a long piece of rolled-up cotton cloth to the black O-ring and glue the formed tube into the inside of the scoop.

The other arm is carefully dry-fitted to insure that I get the right angle.  The arm must be in the correct position or I will not be able to glue on the wrist that holds the large scoop of the gun without the fellow's leg getting in the way.

The model is too front-heavy, so I cut a chunk of lead to fit under the base and super glue it at the rear to balance the weight.

Next I build a weird little spacer that will go inside the tube itself.  I cut some plastic tubing and angle it using a toothpick superglued inside it for strength.  The large silver bead will be a snotling already en-route up the tube - a struggling lump in the middle of the pipe!  Ha-ha!  That's going to look awesome!

I will eventually paint this spacer with tho coats of white paint so it will match the cloth and not be visible through the holes in the loosely woven cotton.

Step 7 - Tube Assembly

Using a toothpick, I wrap the small tube O-ring with a strip of cotton cloth.  This ring is pushed up onto the wires trailing from the front of the shokk attack gun and superglued into place at the warp generator box.

Superglue and cotton react strongly with each other!  The reaction generates heat and a nasty chemical vapor.  So I use very small amounts of glue whenever I put some onto the fabric.  When it dries, however, the result is an almost plastic-like substance that retains it's cloth appearance.

The spacer is attached using white glue (PVA) so that I can adjust the angle it points before it dries.

The scoop end of the tube is superglued into place and the long bit of cloth is wrapped up and around the spacer.

At this point, it's pretty loose and strands of fabric are going everywhere.  I need something to give the tube a more solid shape...

Leather straps!  I cut long, thin sections of masking tape and paint them brown.  After the paint has dried, I use tweezers to wrap the tape around the spacers and give the tube a nice, solid shape.


The middle of the tube is still pretty bad-looking.  I'll need to use another piece of cloth of wrap it up.

I use small amounts of super glue and a toothpick to glue the cotton into plastic and push the tube into the shape I want.  This takes quite a while as I must go very slowly and only do a little bit of the tube at a time (or else the glue will catch the cotton on fire and I don't want that, do I?)

The middle part of the tube is wrapped with a long piece of cloth that overlaps quite a bit of the other two ends.

I use a third masking tape strap to tighten the tube above the silver bead - making it stand out as a lump of 'something' traveling up the tube.

There is a small gap between fabric around this lump, so I cut out a small square of cotton and paint it tan.  This becomes a nice-looking patch right at the sharpest curve of the tube.

Final touches are snipping off stray threads and/or gluing them down.  The 'leather straps' all get a coating of super glue as well, to hold them in place forever.

Step 8 - Stage 2 Painting

Hooray!  Very small amounts of touch-up paint are needed to complete the model.

The primer spheres get several coats of gold and the whole model gets a liberal splatter of mud wash.

What a fine-looking, filthy fiend!

Excellent!  All he needs now is a ready supply of snotlings/ammunition!