Dwarf Deathroller – Behind the Scenes

I posted the repainted Deathroller awhile ago. At the time I thought I had lost all the original photos I had taken of this Frankenstein piece. The other night, I was trying to clean files off my hard drive, and lo and behold! I found pics I had taken of my original Deathroller conversion! I always find behind the scenes work really interesting, so if that isn’t your thing, feel free to skip this one, nothing new here.

The Dwarf Deathroller is a special weapon in the Blood Bowl game, consisting of a big machine that is essentially a spiky steam roller. At the time I into collecting Blood Bowl big time, Games Workshop (GW) had quit making minis for Blood Bowl for several years. GW Blood Bowl minis were going for an ugly sum on Ebay, and it didn’t look like there was any chance of new Blood Bowl minis anytime in the future (little did we know, we just had to wait a decade or so!).

I loved the idea of this behemoth machine being used on the field and had seen some images that sparked my imagination. Unfortunately, official minis were far too expensive and offerings from indie mini manufacturers just didn’t match the image in my head. What to do?

Why, “build your own” of course! One day, I cobbled together bits of toys, plastic stuff I had lying around, and being a techie I had a few computers bits that seemed to work as well.  I had a 2nd edition Dwarf mini who looked like he would fit well, and his padded armor (painted orange) would give him a nice ‘construction worker’ sort of vibe. I also added some squishy green stuff and made the remnant of a hand protruding from underneath.

I don’t seem to have any pics of him post-painting. I did add spiky bits to the barrel on front, which were just pointed ends of mini sprue. All the metal parts were different colors. The main plate was like a coppery color, and there was some tin, and steel colors in there.

When GW returned to making Blood Bowl minis, I thought I would probably end up retiring my Deathroller. As it would likely look too silly against the more serious new stuff. However the new Deathroller was released through the (horribly expensive) Forgeworld, and honestly just didn’t look that great to me. So I ended up deciding to add one of the new Dwarf minis to the old Deathroller. Then a repaint was in order. New handlebars had to be made. I decided to make those a little more wildly curvy, like something you might see on an artsy Motorbike. That probably didn’t translate as well as it did in my head though. A new chair piece was added, and pedals made from green stuff. I also added a fuel tank using a bit I had taken from Mantic’s Deadzone. With the repaint I ended up deciding to go with something that matched the team’s gold color. Gave it a more uniform look this time around and the decals also helped tie it in with the team.

All in all, it was nice to be able to re-use this model and I feel it fits well with not too much of an overhaul. It has a nice bit of nostalgia for me, even though it’s not exactly the original piece anymore.

Hope you enjoyed this nice trip down memory lane!

 

• Blood Bowl
• Miniature Painting
• Miniatures