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:

Field Artillery, Vostroyan Style.

Knocked these together Friday night,to use as Thudd Guns, though I guess since they're rockets, they should be called something else?

I plan on redoing these however, since I just went with materials that I had on hand; the tubes are only 5/32" which feels a tad small for 40K's typically over-sized scaling; I think that 3/16" or 7/32" would be a bit more 40K scale.  some of the parts on the frame are a bit over-scale for my tastes. 

Anyway here's the final product all painted up, with my Master of Ordnance overseeing operations:

I'll do more of a construction article when I do the rebuild and build some proper great-coat crew.

Your punishment will be more severe

I missed out on buying a punisher cannon when they could be easily obtained through the various
bits-sellers, now of course the damn things are as rare as hen's teeth.  Since I want to try out Pask in a Punisher, I decided to build my own to go on my Ragnarok/Russ.

The mantlet was a spare demolisher mantlet that I had lying around, I attached a piece of  3/8" ID tube to serve as a mount for the gatling gun.  The gatling gun itself is 6 pieces of 3/32" tubing around a 1/8" hexagonal rod.  I added a couple of slices of the hex rod on to the mantlet to add detail to the spots where I cut off the demolisher cannon shock absorbers.  I added a piece of round rod to the hex pieces to give the look of a bolt.

I plan to leave the gatling gun removable so that the mantlet can be used to mount a battle cannon or  a vanquisher cannon as well.

And all painted up:

For the Khan!

I've been working adding to the White Scars lately, specifically bikers:

Ecclesiarch #3 Completed

This one's done and shipped.  Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture of it next to her sisters.  Oh well...

People have been asking about the rules, they can be found here.

Ecclesiarch #3 WIP Update 2

Made great progress over the weekend, finished the sponson conversions, the missile racks and the servitors.

Ecclesiarch #3 - WIP Update #1

Just thought I'd post a WIP update on the Ecclesiarch commission. I completed the hull modifications  needed to mount the organist's cockpit and the front plate by lengthening the upper hull by a 1/4" or so, then building a deck from sheet styrene to mount it on.

Ecclesiarch Number 3

Yep, I'm building another.  I've been commissioned to build the third one of these beauties.  When it's done I'll take a family portrait with it's sisters and the babies (regular Exorcists) just for grins. The other two can be seen here and here

CREEEEEEED!

I couldn't help myself when I saw the Scion Commander with the big coat; it just screamed "CREEEEEEEEEED !" to me.  So, I endeavored to make a sort of Vostroyan Creed (Creedokov? Creedin?", and of course a Kell to go with him.  Two of the Scion beret heads have nice mustaches (it's part of the Vostroyan uniform, you know) so I chose the most grandiose mustache to be Creed and the other to be Kell.

For Creed, I wanted to portray his being armed with two hotshot laspistols.  The dagger in the left-hand didn't really say Creed to me, so instead I went with a laspistol from a Cadian sprue; the coat hides the back of the pistol allowing it to pass for a hotshot.  The only real other modification for the model was to sculpt a fur hat over the beret.



Kell required a bit more modification, first off, to look a bit more Vostroyan, he needed a longer coat, courtesy of green stuff; here, I wanted to make the coat long enough to fit the Vostroyan look but short enough to keep all of the armor details on the leg visible

For Kell's left arm, I went with the Baton arm, and grafted the power sword to it.  The right arm holding the regimental standard is the power fist of course, with the thumb removed and replaced with green stuff to allow Kell to grip the standard. 

Void Shield Generator -- UPDATE!

UPDATE! Clearly, GW has gotten wind of my plans for galactic domination!

Stronghold Assault includes an entry for a Void Shield Generator, the rules for it are pretty cool although a bit vague in places and if interpreted literally (as many do) a bit silly. No model exists for the entry which is described as an impassable building with battlements, so how big is it?  My friendly local T.O. posted up some specific rules on his blog here.  I had already built one model for a shield generator, but I decided to build another according to his specs.

Bitz Box Coteaz with 50% more grim-dark

A while back, I acquired most of a fine-cast Coteaz model; I had the body and the hammer.  However, I

was missing the left hand and the psyber-eagle.

Colossus Mortar Conversion

Wow, it's been a while...

The picture below was my first cut at a Colossus Siege Mortar, very quick and dirty completed in the morning before a tournament.  Kind of loosely based on the Morser Karl Gerat.

 Of course, the more I looked at it, the more that I know that I can do much, much better.  Seeking inspiration, I downloaded a paper-craft model of the Colossus that I found here.

I built the main body of the mortar based on the paper-craft, the breach section and the barrel are plumbing fittings.  I added a pair of recoil dampeners made from tubing and some bits from Sentinel kits.  The mounts are just bits of plastic tubing and a plasticard plate as a base.  The muzzle and breech are courtesy of the plumbing section of the local hardware store. 

 The whole thing slides into one of the generic heavy support chassis I built a while back.

And here's the finished product, ready to rain death on the battlefield.

Getting Lit-Up (Land Raider Edition)

Shortly after getting my illuminated Storm Raven done,
I started building my Space Wolves Land Raider with

the cool Forge World doors.  Shortly after starting it though, I decided that I wanted it to be lit up as well.  Whereas with the Raven it was easy to hide the batteries in the flying base, the Land Raider was harder to deal with.

 While it would be easy enough to hide a battery pack in the hold of a Land Raider, I had painted the interior of mine so I would be lighting the interior; a big old battery pack sitting on the floor would be pretty ugly.    I found these battery holders on e-bay:

Each one holds 2 CR 2032's which provides 6.5 Volts or so -- perfect for my uses.  Now where to mount it?  I need the batteries to be accessible so they could be removed/changed without too much fuss.  Ultimately, I decided to hollow out a space on the underside just enough so that the tank would be resting on its treads not on the battery pack. 

I decided to use 4 yellow LED's to light the interior, with 2 on the Mechanicus shrine, one lighting up the control panel opposite the opening side door and one for general lighting.  I used perf board to build a small lighting board for the interior lights to keep everything in the right place.

The headlights are four 3mm white LED's.  For those who are electronically inclined, I wired the yellow LED's in as 2 series pairs each with a 560 ohm resister, for around a 6 mA current draw for the interior.  The headlights are each wired individually with a 1k resister, for around 2 mA each.  I should be able to get around 10 hours of battery life.

Here's the installation

And all lit up

 And the interior