I bought the Killa Kanz kit!
The box art has them standing there all stoically, but when I see these chainsaw wielding murderbots I just imagine them booking it straight for me. 😬
I thought it would be a fun idea to build them up and put them in some dynamic poses just to see what kind of stories they could tell. 😃
First off the Line
First out was Jaws. I gave it the chainsaw nippers and the rocket launcher thinking that they should make for a pretty versatile loadout. I don’t yet play 40k, so I have no idea what the optimal loadout is, but going with the ranged weapon along with one melee weapon felt logical. 🤷
I imagined Jaws boldly stomping around the battlefield not really paying attention to where exactly it was stepping. I was picturing Jaws just about to take a comedically big step onto a pretty noticeable landmine, and while I think that would make for a funny moment before disaster looking picture, I ended up changing my mind last minute. I realised that I had given Jaws the only set of articulating feet! It felt like a waste putting the front foot all the way up in the air when I could use it to grab onto something on the ground. I will definitely revisit the idea of the landmine in the future.
I flipped it onto the front foot and pinned it to a piece of bark that I’m using as basing material. I cut the claws off the foot and reglued them in a grabbing position around the rock. Now it looks like it’s booking it dead ahead.🫡 On with primer and a zenithal highlight and onto the next bot!
A Middle Child
With 2/3 of the pieces left I wanted to save the good stuff for the last Kan, so this middle one got the pieces I was less enthusiastic about. Name? Piston.
Just as I was starting on Piston, my order of plasticard and modelling putty arrived, so I decided to try out my new materials on it. 😄
Yep, there’s a hole in Piston’s face. My headcanon for this is that Piston recently changed owners. It turns out spray foam can’t stop a 70mm anti tank shell and the grot pilot got turned into minced tofu. I had a fun time making the shell craters, especially the ricochet off the left pouldron.
I snatched the engine off of Piston to use on the third model, so I had to come up with a plasticard and green stuff stand-in. It’s not great, giving me tabletop grill vibes, but I’m quite happy with the handmade fan on the bottom. 😄
The arm and legs are all hydraulics and I actually came to really like how everything fit together. The kit came with these dangly bits to put underneath the kans, but I ended up snipping the chains up and attaching them to the pauldron instead.
For the basing I really wanted a level difference so I would have an excuse to shorten one of the legs, giving it the appearance of being retracted. I ended up taking a saw to the right one and lobbing off a solid 6mm of height. I also took a knife to the rim around the leg mounting points to be able to squeeze some extra degrees of poseability out of the model. 😃
Here we are primed.
Big Conversion
I wanted a deff dread, but it turns out that they’re for online sales only, so my local game store doesn’t stock them. Buying one of those outside the large combat patrol box is also slightly more expensive than the kit of three killa kanz… I decided to instead make a dread out of one of my kanz.
Having looked at the Killa Kanz data sheet, it turns out that they’re only fieldable in groups of 3-6, so at some point I’ll be scratchbuilding a third killa kan to make up for converting one…🫣
But what is a Deff Dread?
It would seem that the defining visual feature of a deff dread is the amount of arms. While a killa kan has two, a dread usually has four, and these arms are more often than not equipped with large melee weapons. In the lore Killa Kanz are crewed by the smaller more ballistically gifted goblin like grots, while dreads are piloted by orks, who are poor shots, but powerful melee combatants.
This is Powersurge, a quite cramped dread that has been converted from a kan. An ork mekboy crammed a second engine into an elongated killa kan chassis and bolted on a pair of auxiliary arms fitted with klawz. I like to think that the painboy in charge lobbed the non essentials off of an ork boy and forced them in sideways to make everything fit.
Surge is about: 55% killa kan parts, 30% plasticard, 10% green stuff, and 5% household garbage. The fuel tank on the back is made from a dog poop bag cardboard roll and the metal ”hoses” are spent guitar strings. 😄
The legs were extended using plasticard rods to make the model look less squatty. The extensions work well making the legs look more proportional with the extended arms up top.
Using the flash gitz kit as reference, I drew up and carved a jolly ork out of some plasticard to put up on a pole. It serves as a banner to make the dread feel like a propa freeboota mech. It also helps the model look even taller without the use of a tactical rock. 😁
I just had the last arm to finish before I could get this thing based up and primed. I didn’t really have a plan other than some sort of mechanical hand with big hydraulics. I’m building this piece by piece trying to make sure that the pivot points and pistons are placed semi believably.
The big hand I had in mind got reworked into this pincer looking thing! I couldn’t get the hand right, and the part turned out too big.
I’m also using greenstuff to create ball and socket joints so that I can decide on a pose later. I’d like to make up some more greebly bits to fill out the flat spots, the GW parts are peppered with rivets and screw heads, along with some hoses and wires.
I threw together a rather simple base, this time going lighter on the pine bark, but adding in some stray shrapnel instead. 😄 I made up some additional pauldron pieces and greenstuffed them onto the ones included in the kit before gluing them onto the upper set of arms. These are the last additions I’m making to the model. 🤞
Primed
It’s fun to finally see it all come together. 😮
I like how well the plasticard/green stuff hydraulics blend into the rest of the model, and how the big mechanical pincer klaw looks like it fits right in with the ork buzz saw.
This build took a couple of weeks of on and off building and this post has dragged on for longer than I intended, so I’m cutting it off here. I’ll post an update when I get around to painting these mechs, until then. Cheers!
RömerWorks 
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