I’m putting together the final parts of my Chainsaw Warrior-Space Hulk mashup and one of the key elements is the Meat Machine. For those who are not familiar with Games Workshop’s classic game, the Meat Machine was a two-wheeled cyborg zombie, which to a great extent defies categorisation. Like everything else in the game there’s a lot of atmosphere, but very little in the way of detail or explanation. Quite what the Meat Machine is, who made it, and why it has turned up in a derelict building only minutes before the apocalypse is left to our imagination. What we do have is two images, one is just the head on the card, and the other is this rather more useful illustration from the rulebook.
Meat Machine illustration
I’ve started turning it into a model by rummaging through the bits box. So far, I’ve come up with this. I’ve gone for the whole skeleton torso rather than just the head, because I think a skull would be more or less lost on the tabletop, and part of the mood of this thing is the mixture of machine and corpse. In addition, if you scaled it precisely, it’s actually pretty small – look how big the skull is compared to the rest of it. It wouldn’t stand as high as an average person, and I think it needs to be more imposing. The main body of mine is an old 80s clip together motorbike kit turned upside down and stuck onto the wheels, which gives it some bulk, and a pleasing, looming-over sort of aspect.
Meat Machine in progress
The wheels are from an old 105mm WWII german gun. I originally bought some cheap cars from a pound shop, but they turned out to be too big and they didn’t have the mudguards. These wheels are proportionally smaller than in the illustration, but I don’t mind that. They remind me of wheels from some kind of Harley trike, resonant of the one Carl Critchlow drew himself standing by in the back of the first Thrud collection, and together with the body it’s building up a grungey biker aesthetic.
I left the shark mouth off, it just seemed a bit too weird, and too difficult to model. Next steps are to attach some more dieselpunk gubbins to the engine, spikes on the front and wheels, and tackle the arms. Again, looking at the proportions of the illustration, the weaponry is very small, a modern GW cyborg would have a buzzsaw about five times bigger. I’m going to beef it up a little bit, but nothing too cartoony. I’ve got a couple of arms made up out of wire – one with a meat chopper and one with a chainsaw, but I’m struggling with where to attach them. The skeleton’s shoulders bring them too far forward, but they look odd sprouting out of the main body. I might try building up the shoulders with extra struts.
Rather like dinosaurs we don’t really know what colour the Meat Machine is. The card shows red eyes, metal coloured struts and that’s it. I’m imagining a sort of very dusty weathered black for the mudguards and the rest oily metal, like a bike that’s been all the way down Route 66 and back, but I’m open to ideas – how do you imagine it?
Leave a Reply