October has, for as long as I’ve been back in the hobby, been Orktober, the ceremonial month in which Ork/Orc/Orruck players simultaniously celebrate the wide array of ways in which they enjoy and embody their chosen faction, and also lament their apparent abandonment by Games Workshop. Many other hobbyists, myself included, take October as an excuse to build and paint something orkish, and in 2023 I built an Ork Warboss in Mega-Armour and told myself that the following year, I would like to build a stompa.
Now, 2024 was stymied by the same forces that prevented 2024 from being The Year of the Reaver Titan, but embolded by the house purchase I declared 2025 to be the year I’d do it, and I purchased the stompa kit around August and started making Plans™️.
You have to acknowledge that the stompa is an old kit. Really old. They were released alongside the baneblade kit in 2009, which means that it can now purchase an alcoholic drink at Bugmans as long as its owner its present and they both purchase a full meal. This has some consequences, like several parts having mating surfaces that are more like suggestions and instructions that look like this:
Also, as much as I love the stompa for its classic look, it is 2025 and it needed an upgrade. When I got back into the hobby, you could purchase upgrades for the stompa from Forgeworld, and these included a belly gun, a new head and two new arms, and whilst these are no longer available, I wanted to do something similar in spirit.
My plan was simple: add a belly gun, replace the shoulder turret, upgrade the chainsaw arm and put the cannon on an actual arm. All sounds quite simple when you put it like that, but it turned out to be a lot more work than I expected.
First on the docket was the belly gun. After contemplating both scratchbuilding a bombard-style cannon and 3D printing something, I settled on the Stormsword cannon from the baneblade kit (released at the same time) and managed to grab the casemate weapon sprue on ebay for a reasonable price.
It was simple enough to build the cannon, cut a hole in the front of the stompa (following the panel lines to keep it consistent) and then build a small structure internally to hold the cannon.
Some plasticard panelling later with a few assorted glyph plates to blend it in, and the belly gun was now in place. It was October 9th and I was feeling good. So I threw myself into building a circular saw for the chainsaw arm. I have a strong memory of seeing the Assault on the Imperial Palace diorama at the original Warhammer World museum as a child, and one of the standout memories was of the dueling warlord titans, and what could be more orky than a half remembered dream of a giant weapon?
My first attempt ran into a logistical problem: the disk was too big for the bar of the stock chainsaw and there would have been no way for the teeth to rotate. I did consider going “fuck it, it’s orkish” but I strongly believe that ork technology should at least be visually plausible: pistons should clearly move, things should have clearance, sure it should be ramshackle but it should be functional.
Clearly the answer was more scrachbuilding. Each of the teeth was carved from four layers of plasticard using a mix of a scalpel, hand files and a dremel using an original prototype tooth as a rough guide but intentionally keeping them irregular. I would later rotate it 180 degrees so it cut downwards, as the upcut looked weird (even though one of the other inspirations were the big cutting wheels you see in mines).
Close combat arm complete, I moved on to the gun arm, and the first step there was to construct the gun itself. Which ran into a problem almost immediately:
I mentioned this kit is sixteen years old. Mine had a few defects I’d originally shrugged off, but the weapon sprue was a short shot – not enough plastic had been injected into the mould, leaving a massive gap in one of the cannon pieces. No bother, I’ll just kitbash something.
In addition to building a new arm structure to hold the gun, and rearranging several components of the gun to better suit this new underslung arrangement, I took the zappy bit from a mek gun kit and built that onto the end of the cannon to make a mek cannon. You can also see here the new jaw I gave the stompa, which is the front ram from a battlewagon. I thought I was very clever doing this, but it turns out that it’s a very common conversion.
One thing you may notice is the grey plastic component that linkes the scratchbuilt upper-arm to the elbow joint: that’s from the Necromunda Gang Stronghold kit, which was a wonderful donor of plenty of structural steel looking elements here and elsewhere. Looking at it though, it was missing something. Something essential… PISTONS.
Several frantic hours of styrene scratch building later and I had be-pistoned and be-cabled the arm such that it looked like it could hold its own weight and maybe even have some kind of motivated movement! (Please don’t look too closely at where some of the arm pistons actually go) You can also see in the background that I added a new shoulder pad, mostly constructed from the optional big belly face plate which I clearly wasn’t going to use here.
The last major construction effort was replacing the shoulder turret. The old one in the kit was looking weedy compared to the new additions, so I stole the double turret from the battlewagon kit as well and kitbashed a new mount for it using a combination of the intended mounting plate from the battlewagon and various bits of gang stronghold structural members. There was a lot of filing, some structural application of gap filling superglue and not a little swearing, but it fit and was solid. Aside from some minor detailing, the build was materially complete.
It was the 22nd of October, and the stompa was now built, primed and covered in an iniital basecoat of Vallejo Metal Colour Engine Manifold (a favourite colour for working metal). But I was feeling the fatigue at this point. My plan had been that this stage would be simple: the colour scheme was a mismash of metal colours, some rust and grime, paint a few panels red and white and pick out the details: bob’s your uncle and it’s done in a few days.
It took longer than I’d hoped to mask off panels to spray them different colours, and it took several attempts to find good combinations of panel colours that looked intentional while still looking suitably ramshackle. I also had some issues with paint tear out, and the entire second half of the project was also cursed with adhesion issues from the liberal use of enamel washes.
On October 28th I was done with the metal superstructure, but also I was running out of October and with the combined pressures of work and life, I knew I wasn’t going to get it done.
I pushed through and tried to get some colour onto it, picking out some panels in red and white, but at the end of October the stompa went into the cabinet, unfinished, until I could find the time and energy to continue.
This feels like a good point for an interlude to talk about the colour scheme.
When I painted the warboss two years ago, he came with some backstory. It’s a common idea that Orks infest space hulks, because the other denizens of the hulks offer up an excellent chance for a good scrap, not to mention that when the hulks transit the warp, there are often many areas of the hulk in which demons can break through and Orks love khornate demons especially because both sides fight for the love of the fight.
Our boy, da Grey Boss, was caught on such a hulk when a grey knight retinue busted in to kill a greater demon, cutting short his warband’s attempts to also fight said greater demon. He could have been mad, but he was instead completely enamoured by the grey knight’s armour and fighting styles. As soon as he had recovered his power and influence, he commissioned his own suit of mega-armour in the same style, aping the chrome armour with red and white heraldic patterns, except he was also an ork and so maintaining polished metal wasn’t on his todo list and it became rusty quickly.
Da Dread Stompa is his newest toy. The grey knights who he saw fight the demon were accompanied by a dreadknight, which grew in stature with every retelling until one of the meks in da Grey Boss’s own retinue found himself afflicted by a strange mood and demanded ever more stuff and scrap and tech until he could construct a stompa that could rival anything the knights of Titan could muster.
Fast forward to the end of December, and I had completed a project and was casting around for something new to work on. The stompa loomed large in my mind, and I wanted to have it complete before the end of the year. And free of obligations, I did!
I eased back in and painted the grot manning the turret’s turret. He’s having a whale of a time. Just don’t tell him that at minimum elevation, I think the ground is just about out of range of that stubber.
Next up came more detail on the mek cannon, with more glowy bits and painted detail on the missiles.
And then there’s a million and one smaller details. I declared the model complete at about half three on New Years Eve.
Where I finished the Mastodon in sadness at how Forgeworld has fallen from grace, and the Reaver in creative ecstacy at what I’d achieved, the Stompa is more muted. I am very proud of it as a model: it is highly converted and I am on balance very happy with it. The circular saw could be improved, and there are elements of the gun arm I’d redo, but they work together as a whole. And there’s a real pleasure at taking a kit that on its own is quite plain and forcing it to your will. That’s the orkish, and more importantly the ork player-ish, way.
So what does 2026 hold? As I said at the end of part two, these three blog posts will be cleaned up along with the intermissions, a new introduction and a brand new conclusion and they’ll be turned into a zine. Which I hope to have completed before the first Goonhammer Open of 2026.
I also intend at least two new bigatures in ’26, the first of which will be coming soon as my friends at Rollmodels are doing an event called “The Big Boy Buildout™️ (Because Bigature Breeds Bewilderment)” to build a superheavy or similar. And as mentioned in the previous two articles, both models have things I’d like to add to them.
But for now, I sign off, having completed three bigatures in a year, very happy with my hobby, and I hope that with these blog posts, I have brought you, dear reader, some joy too.