Making Scavengers from Plastic Gangers
A step by step tutorial
by Iver Stubdal

EM-4's scavengers are great figures for post-apocalyptic gaming, but there just aren't enough of them. Scavengers by their nature tend to be highly individual. Some other companies make similar figures, but there you can never have enough! Once again, the ever useful plastic combat zone figures come to the rescue. The plastic gangers are a perfect basis for being pressed into service as scavengers, we just need to make some conversions to take the cyberpunk out of them and make them into destitute survivors. The project got started when a friend gave me an old resin pickup truck, and told me to "do something with it". I thought it was quite nice as it was, the only thing it needed was to have a gunner riding on the back, to make it look like a proper "technical". After failing to find a suitable figure, I finally remembered those plastic gangers I had never gotten round to painting. With a bit of reposing and a scratch-built machine gun, the girl with the long, flowing braid was a perfect fit, and really made the truck look dynamic, like it was speeding across the wasteland. Then I thought, wouldn't it be nice if she could get off the truck occasionally, and fight on foot? Since I had two sets of gangers, it was easy to make a corresponding figure, armed with a revolver and long combat knife. To make her look like a proper scavenger, I tore up her clothing a bit by applying a thin layer of putty, then pulling it back to make holes. I was so satisfied with this figure, I decided to give the other gangers the same treatment. The weapons most of them were armed with were too bulky and futuristic for my taste, so in true scavenger spirit I raided my parts box for suitable guns and other bits to embellish them with. This ganger is relatively unmodified. I trimmed away the rotary magazine on his shotgun and gave him some scavenged armour in the form of a spiky shoulder pad and a shin-guard. I modeled some extra equipent like the sunglasses, some shotgun shells and a couple of hand grenades, and roughed up his trousers a bit. The next ganger is armed with a shotgun I had left over from another project.

The gun actually came complete with the forearms, so fitting it to the figure was quite easy, I just had to sculpt some new upper arms. I also gave him a torn-up shirt and a motorcycle helmet, and loaded him up with a backpack and some pouches. The end result is a really scruffy looking scavenger. The rugged AK-47 will probably survive the the apocalypse in large numbers, so it makes a particularly suitable weapon for scavengers. I cut away the plastic gun from the combat zone ganger's arms, and gave him the AK instead. This ganger was wearing some kind of high-tech eyepiece that didn't seem appropriate for a scavenger, so I cut it off and covered the scar with a pirate style eye patch. Then I gave him a new hair style to make the patch blend in better, and finally a mustache for good measure. For the last figure, I made new arms from scratch so that she holds her AK-47 at eye level, and gave her a new head from the parts box, posed so that she's aiming along the gun. I sculpted her a cut off shirt and some pants, as well as a beret. Maybe she shows a bit more skin than is practical for a scavenger, but that is hardly unusual in the miniatures world. Using a few spare bits and a dash of putty, I now have five new scavengers that fit in very well with the ones I already have, ready to fight over the last resources of a dying planet.