1st Post! Lets get this ball rolling with a lil background information!

A while back I decided to try a new hobby, and that hobby turned out to be table-top wargaming. What that entails is getting a bunch of miniature army men and vehicles and playing them out on a table made up like a battlefield or forest etc. I figured hey, I like models and I like painting, so this looksl ike a win/win sitituation. I set about to find some Warhammer 40k models, but to my suprise these lil bits of plastic and metal cost a good bit more than some bag of green army men. $15 for ONE small metal guy in a blisterpack?! There's got to be a better way!

I decided to do this on the cheap, so I checked out ebay and found a lot of broken, badly painted, and all around mishandled space marine minis on the cheap. I like a decent challenge and figured this would be the best way to try 40k out without the big investment. With my "buy it now" bid placed, I was the new owner of a slew of minis that arrived at my door fairly quick. Upon opening the boxes, the minis didnt appear as bad as they looked in the ebay photo, but they needed alot of work nonetheless. Alot were put together wrong (i.e. medic guy's shoulder badge on the wrong marine etc.) and painted horribly, but I had a plan - and that plan was SIMPLE GREEN. With the minis sitting in a bucket of Simple Green, a good bit of the bad paint sloughed off leaving the rest to scraped with a toothbrush.

While I dont have a pic of most of the "before" models I do have a few showcasing the damage and quality of what I had to work with:



And here is a vehicle that was broken up. I managed to get a few replacement bits off Ebay to fix it up (most dark parts are new addons). It still needs more work as of this photo:



I've decided to make the Space Sharks chapter of space marines (hence the name) due to the simple color scheme and awesome name! SPAAAAAAACEE SHARRRKKSS!!
I've got all my paints and tools out, time to get crackin'!