Oldhammer MD8 Skeleton Skullchucker/Screaming Skull Catapult Crew

Oldhammer MD8 Skeleton Skullchucker/Screaming Skull Catapult Crew

This trio of skellingtons are, obviously, from the original Skullchucker (later known as the Screaming Skull) Catapult, released as part of the MD8 Skeleton War Machines boxed set, way back in October 1987. This isn’t my first Skullchucker crew, as I painted and posted my previous one back in 2015. These guys I picked up off of eBay probably shortly after finally painting the previous one, as I was well into building the Undead army for KoW at the time. As often happens with eBay purchases, the models were badly painte,d and so these needed stripping. Worse, though was that the catapult itself seemed to have part of it’s frame sawn in half at some stage, so it’s presently somewhere in bits, probably in a jar of dried-out paint stripper that I’ll need to get to sometime so I can repair it, paint it and reunite this set of models.

Sometime when the weather is nicer and I don’t have the relentless bullshit of life pounding at me. Maybe/hopefully over summer if all goes well (ha!) It certainly won’t be in October!

Oldhammer Orc Shaman and General (1988, Kev Adams)

Oldhammer Orc Shaman and General (1988, Kev Adams)

Today as my penultimate post for June(!) we have some more proper Oldhammer. This pair of models, as the post title has already told you are an Orc Shaman and General, circa 3rd Edition Warhammer. As you may have noticed, they’re not articularly large, nor outlandish in their posing, but that’s just the way things were way back then. This pair are the two that used to lead my own Orc army, back during my WHFB period from around ’89 and into 4th edition and just a couple of games beyond that, when Herohammer put me off entirely.

Oldhammer Orc Shaman and General (1988, Kev Adams)

These two are basically “renovated” models – where some of the paint is my original work from the time, some things have been repainted (usually just toning down something garish or where a colour simply didn’t work), chips and such have been repainted, additonal highlights where needed, models rebased, and the riders finally glued down permanently instead of left separate for transport in my older cases.

Oldhammer Orc Shaman and General (1988, Kev Adams)

The Shaman has a Bob Marley-esque rasta-coloured flag, as the model has deadlocks – so what else could I reasonably do? In my updating, I also gave him the glowy eyes because he’s a magic orc! Back in thise 3rd edition games he often used necromantic magic to summon conga lines of skeletons thet broke up line of sight between the units of orcs so that they wouldn’t need to test for Animosity and start fighting amongst theselves. Ah, those were the days.. 

Oldhammer Orc Shaman and General (1988, Kev Adams)

The general doesn’t have nearly as interesting a story. His shield is from the Marauder Miniatures sprue, and while both of them originally had those banner poles that you can see in the old Stuff of Legends catalogues, there really was no proper way to attach them – especially so if you were a teenager and had to put the models into the cases we had back in the day – and not attached to their mounts, as mentioned earlier! I may have them still somewhere, in some pitz box or another. I doubt I’d add them back on, though – even if I were to find them…