Warbooty

I briefly touched upon this whole ‘warboot’ thing in the last Patreon newsletter (which you can catch up on HERE if you like) – but I thought I’d go into a bit more detail here on the blog in regard to some of the models I picked up at the last event… and how that’s inspired a new project.

What’s a Warboot?

First of all, I should probably explain what a warboot is (for those who are not familiar)… though the term seems to have gone a bit out of fashion since someone tried to trademark the term (though they promptly backed down when they faced a lot of backlash from the community).

Anyway, I don’t know how common ‘car boot sales’ are around the world (HERE is the Wikipedia entry if you want to know more about them) – but the term is commonly shortened to just ‘CarBoot’ …and, as you’ve probably guessed, a ‘WarBoot’ is a play on that.

And, instead of folks selling off some of their unwanted household items (like you might find at a CarBoot… which you can probably think of as a sort of garage sale – but on a larger scale), at a Warboot, the things on offer are ‘hobby’ related.

Now, there have been a few of these popping up locally of late (or at least, this is the first I’m hearing of them), So on the 15th of August I attended one of these events for the first time (as it wasn’t too far away).

I didn’t really know what to expect, but seeing how it was free entry, there’s not a lot to lose right?

However, I have to say, it was pretty cool. I mean, the place it was held at wasn’t super huge or anything like that – but there were a ton of things on offer (both old and new), and it made for a good afternoon out.

And, of course, I did end up buying a few things while I was there – so here’s what I got (though there were other things I was tempted by, and a few things I regret not picking up):

Pictured here (on the left) are five metal space marine scouts from 1997, and next to them is a Marauder dark elf (corsair?) from 1995. On the right are nine of the first ever plastic skaven models (from the ‘fantasy regiments’ box from the late 80’s I believe), and at the back is a newer sprue of space marine accessories that had 2 pieces missing.

All together this cost £19 (Scouts: £10 / Dark Elf: 50p / Skaven: £8 / Sprue: 50p) – which I thought was a pretty good deal considering the fact the scouts alone often go for around £5 each on ebay.

Anyway, as you can see, they did need a bit of work to get them cleaned up and ready to paint – and so that’s exactly what I did.

First the scouts were stripped (by leaving them overnight in a jar of dettol, and then some serious scrubbing with an old toothbrush):

Then primed (I just use the Army Painter brush-on grey primer for this):

And finally painted and based:

And, as you should be able to tell, I’ve gone with Blood Angels for these – mainly because when I was a kid, that’s how I painted my very first space marine models :)

That being said, I never had any of these particular miniatures – but painting red shoulder pads again sure did bring back some memories (luckily for me though, paint formulas have improved a lot since then – so I didn’t have to give them half a dozen coats to get decent coverage).

Anyway, now that I know that these ‘warboot’ events are happening semi-regularly at different venues across the Midlands… with the next being in Wolverhampton tomorrow…

...I think I’m going to try to get to more of them – with the aim of adding something new to this ‘warboot army’ each time (and also setting myself the challenge of having to paint up most of what I buy, before attending the next one... at least in regard to this particular 40k project).

Now that doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be more Blood Angels (though that’s the main idea), as I can fall back on other ‘imperial’ stuff – perhaps to represent some kind of ad-hock force that’s been thrown together from the remnants of much larger armies – maybe as a last ditch defence of a particular world/city/etc. (as stuff like that is easy to do with One Page Rules, or even the original Rogue Trader game… as I picked up the reprint of the latter a couple of years back).

So that’s the plan. All being well, tomorrow I’ll be heading off to Wolverhampton with my brother, and we’ll see what other bargains are on offer (and find out if I can actually expand on this 'army' with some more warbooty :) ).