Commission: Storm Talon Conversion

I was contacted by very pleasant gentleman who asked if I could convert a Storm Talon for him, along the lines of one he'd seen on Dakka Dakka

Absolutely!  Actually it's a  pretty simple conversion  which should look pretty good when completed.

After assembling the cockpit area, I started in on the conversion work; the first step was to flip the tail which requires cutting the fins off of the fuselage halves.  Before re-attaching, I cut the now lower fins to match the line of the trailing edge of the fuselage.

In order to ensure a strong joint and maintain alignment, I created a sort of spar from plasticard.

The fuselage halves with flipped tail:

Next, the wings for this conversion use the tail-plane of the model cut in half, and used in lieu of the little stub wings.

And the stub wings end up on the fuselage at the tail

Overall look:

I offered to magnetize the weapons pods; he sent some magnets, but I opted to use some from my own stock since I want to ensure a secure fit.  The smaller magnets may work but I'm a bit paranoid about magnetized parts falling off.  The magnets inside the pod are 6mm disks, while the magnets on the options are 3mm x 3mm disks.  The magnets are slightly counter-sunk into the options and end up going into the body of the pod -- they end up interlocking as well as pulling the parts together.

Really the last thing to do is to mount the Ravenwing assault cannons on the wing-tips.  One bit that original poster on Dakka failed to mention was that he did a cut and flip on the assault cannon, not hard to do as long as you're careful with the razor saw.

And the finished model with various weapon options: