Death Guard Plague Hulk

I know I should be concentrating on painting my World Eaters but I’ve been finding converting models to be much more interesting. As well as my World Eaters I realised that I had enough infantry and vehicles to put together a Death Guard army if I did a bit of converting.

My first conversion is a Plague Hulk:

This is based on a Vanguard Miniatures Cybershadows Gun Grab, plastic Ork Dreadnought bits and OOP GW Nurglings. I don’t know what era of Warhammer these Nurglings are from but I got 25 of them for £5 on ebay so they’re not exactly breaking the bank! I’m also using a couple of the larger Nurglings as Nurgle Daemon Princes. They’re very detailed and thoroughly disgusting models, I love ‘em! 😀

Size wise my Plague Hulks aren’t as big as forumware Defilers:

I don’t think it matters and I wanted my Plague Hulks to look different and feel less lumbering than the existing forumware Defilers, I wanted them to look more the Spider Baby in Toy Story 1:

Ok, onto how I built my Plague Hulks. You will need the following items as well as bit of green stuff to fill in any gaps:

1x Vanguard Miniatures Gun Crab
1x OOP GW Nurgling
1x OOP plastic Ork Dreadnaught

It is assumed that you will clean the miniatures up as and when required, I’m not going to remind you to file mold lines off! 😉 In terms of tools you’ll need a cutting mat, a sharp hobby knife, some hobby clippers, appropriate needle files for cleaning the model up (I used round and flat needle files), some green stuff and super glue.

First you need to cut the top half of the Gun Crab from its body:

Once the top half has been separated from the bottom half put the top half in your bits box because I don’t know about you but it looks like it could be the starting point for Plague Drone to me. 🙂

You now need to smooth the top part of the body where the Nurgling is going to sit. I whittled the metal down  using a sharp hobby knife. Be warned the body is very fiddle to hold and the metal is quite hard while you whittle it, remember that it’s much easier to continue the conversion with your fingers intact! Once I’d whittled the metal down I used a needle file to smooth it off:

Before you glue your Nurgling  the body of the Gun Crab have a think about if you want to leave the Nurgling as in or if you want to cut one of its hands off and replace it with a gun as per the Forgeworld Model. I didn’t make this decision until I’d built the Plague Hulk and it was fiddly to do after the event. I used the gun barrel from the Ork Dreadnought:

Of course you could not do this and leave your Nurgling intact, it is Epic scale after all and who’s to say that his gun isn’t actually him vomiting something disgusting over the enemy! 😉

When you glue your Nurgling onto the body of the Gun Crab remember to leave some room behind the Nurgling:

This is because you need to add the engine exhausts. The engine exhausts are actually part of a Gun Crab gun:

Cut the gun as below and use a needle file to level where you’ve cut:

Before you glue the exhaust to the back of the Gun Crabs body cut the existing exhausts off the Gun Crabs body until you have a level surface and now glue the new exhausts on:

Glue the exhausts onto the body:

Time to add the claws. Carefully cut the claws off the plastic Ork Dreadnought model. I found this was made easier by cutting the Dreadnoughts legs from the body first. The claws should now look like:

Glue the claws onto the Gun Crab body. The claws are not a neat fit where they join the body so fill them with green stuff as required:

I noticed that the claws sat about 0.5mm higher than where they joined the top of the body so I cut them slightly to create a neater fit. 0.5mm isn’t a lot but it’d be noticeable one the model was painted. Finally glue the Gun Crab legs onto the body. These are quite fragile so I strongly recommend that you base your model for additional strength. I used 40mm flat round bases from Renedra Ltd but there are plenty of other basing options out there.

Once based your Plague Hulk is complete!

At the time of writing this I built my Plague Hulks for under £5 each with a lot of spare bits left over including the top half of the Gun Crabs that I intend to turn into Plague Drones once I can find a cheap way of buying or creating the engine fans for them.

World Eaters the painting begins!

I’ve finally managed to actually start painting my World Eaters. This is quite an achievement considering I’ve not painted anything for months.

First up are the original plastic Dreadnoughts. There’s not a lot of detail or definition on these but I like the design and they painted up fairly well:

Some close ups:

I was lucky enough to get hold of eight Forumware Rhinos a year or so ago and I painted one to work out the colour scheme. The detail on these is fantastic and it painted up a treat:

The base isn’t finished, hence why the paint is still wet on it. It’s a shame that the production of these miniatures was so short lived.

Finally, I started to paint an old Space Marine 1st Edition Blood Thirster that I’m using as a Daemon Prince:

It’s a really great miniature, moreso when you consider the age of the sculpt is around 29 years. No that doesn’t make me feel old. Not one bit. *cough*

Khorne Lord of Battle

The New Year has definitely come and gone however I’m still keeping one of my New Year resolutions going. The resolution being to finish building putting my World Eaters army together. I finished collecting it a while ago and I’m slowly working my way through stripping paint from second hand models I’ve bought, cleaning them up and putting them together. Considering I loathe putting models together it’s all been going well so far.

Originally I was only going to field one Lord of Battle but I had another almost complete one kicking about that would also be worth building and painting. The downside is that he’s ‘armless (sorry):

I spent a few weeks trawling ebay and asking around to see if anybody had a spare Lord of Battle arm, or anything suitable, but nothing came to fruition. This left me with the option of attempting a scratch build replacement arm. After digging through my bits box I found an old Skaven Rat Ogre arm to use as the basis for the arm and it rolled from there:

It still needs a bit of tidying up and having taken photos of it the skull at the front of the gun really isn’t working for me because it makes the gun look front heavy compared to the other weapon on the model. Even so the size of the arm is about right and blutacked onto the model it looks a bit like this:

Once I’ve worked out what to replace the skull with and the arm is undercoated it shouldn’t look too out of place.

Banelord Titan

I’m not going to dwell on the gap between my last post and this one or bore you with all the decorating I’ve done over the summer months! Instead I’ll cut to the chase and talk about my World Eaters and what I’ve been up to today.

I never meant to collect an Epic World Eaters army; it’s more something I fell into collecting. Very long story short, earlier in the year I bought the original Adeptus Titanicus/Space Marine 1st Edition era Epic Chaos Horde boxed set for under £20 on ebay simply because it was under £20.

Like all of the boxed sets from this era the sheer amount of miniatures you got in the box was impressive:

Hard to believe you got all of that for £8 in 1991! Bargain! I didn’t have a plan for these miniatures beyond thinking that they might come in handy at some point or that I might build a small Chaos force. Not too long after purchasing these I ended up bulk buying a large number of Daemon Engines and Daemons from a seller on one of the Epic trading pages on Facebook for a decent price and this was the start of me collecting a World Eaters army. I won’t go into all of the details now but I’ve ended up with a sizable World Eaters army. Instead I’m going to discuss my Banelord Titan.

Getting hold of a Banelord Titan became, ahem, the bane of my life for a few months. I’d seen them in decent condition regularly go for £15 plus postage on ebay but the minute I wanted to buy one prices averaged £30-35 plus postage with the condition being fairly variable. Typical! So, I decided to stick to my guns and wait patiently for a sensibly priced Banelord Titan to turn up. Months passed and still no Banelord Titan. Eventually I caved in and paid £30 including p&p for one on a trading forum and I’ve not seen one for less than that since. The condition of the Banelord Titan I bought was good but it needed a bit of a refurb.

The back banner had snapped off with the lugs being stuck in the Titans’ carapace. These were fairly easy to drill out but it meant that the banner had to be pinned onto the carapace. I used quite long pins because the back banner is fairly top heavy when the missile rack is added:

I removed the rest of the metal components from the Banelord Titan, stripped the paint off them and removed the mold lines. I also pinned the Banelord Titans tail onto the Titan because the join is incredibly weak when just glued onto the Titans body. I cleaned the model up, glued everything back on and gave it a quick spray of primer:

You might notice that I added a couple of spikes from my bits box to the carapace to cover the empty holes where weapons are usually plugged into.

Mystery solved!

The last time I posted I was wondering wondered about these vehicle sides:

Those thoroughly nice people on the “Epic Space Marine 40k” Facebook Group solved the mystery in about 1 second of me posting, they’re quicker than the experts on The Miniatures Page! They’re the original sides from the Mk1 Space Marine Whirlwind:

So, there we go! 🙂 What surprises me is how many Mk1 Space Marine Whirlwinds I own (I’ve got them in both my Imperial Guard and Space Marine armies) yet I only have one pair of these sides, you’d think I would own a few more.

Anyway, I’ve finally finished my first Salamander Legion Tactical Detachment:

Given that I’ve painted huge amounts of Imperial Guard infantry just painting eight bases of Space Marines was a breeze! I would’ve loved to paint chapter markings on the Space Marines but I’m just not that masochistic!

I started to paint my Legion Jet Bikes (well, the Mk2 Space Marine ones) and I was hoping to have them finished today but my new pot of Vallejo black paint is currently coming out gloss meaning that I can’t finish those bikes yet. I guess I’ll just have to keep shaking that pot of paint!

Instead, I’ve started to paint my Legion Land Raider Battle Squadron:

These metal models paint up really well (not that you can tell in my photo) which is impressive when you consider their age! Once the Land Raiders are finished I’ll start work on my second Legion Tactical Detachment.

Mystery vehicle bits

I’ve been cleaning up and gluing my AT:SMv1 era vehicles I discovered two sides of a vehicle that don’t fit any of that era of Space Marine vehicles. Although they look like the vehicle sides that fit the original Rhino, Vindicator and Whirlwind models they’re slightly smaller and slightly more detailed:

Note: that I’ve not removed any flash from the vehicle sides.

The differences between the mystery vehicle sides and the usual ones are as follows:

* More detailed lights.
* More detailed tracks.
* More detailed wheels.
* More detailed stowage area.
* The exhaust has four holes in it and not three.
* Less detail on the top of the exhaust.
* The doors are slightly smaller.
* The hole the body plugs into is smaller.

Below is a comparison with the mystery sides at the top, usual vehicle sides in the middle and Predator vehicle sides at the bottom:

And a closer comparison between the mystery sides at the top and the usual vehicle sides at the bottom:

The position of the gaps a body would plug into with the mystery one at the top and a standard one at the bottom:

The metal is consistent with the sides released during the AT:SMv1 era and it looks like it contains lead. Because of this, and the fact that they’ve been in a box for twenty plus years(!), I don’t believe they’re fan made.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the vehicle body that the sides connect onto and I can’t remember where I got these vehicle sides from. Could they be from a very early version of the AT:SMv1 Rhino that was changed to a less detailed part to make casting easier? Do I have part of an unreleased sculpt? Something else? Answers on a postcard..! 🙂

Epic 30k

The painting of my Steel Legion army has stalled due to the models needing stripping and repainting which has drained my enthusiasm for the project for the time being. Instead I began to sort out my Epic Space Marines with the intention of painting an EpicA Codex Space Marine army that could also fit in with my Space Marine 2nd edition Space Marine army. As I was going through the models I own it occurred to me that with a bit of planning I could put together a 30k Heresy Era Space Marine army list using my MK6 Beakies from Space Marine 1st edition and metal vehicles from that era. I realise that technically 30k Space Marines wore MKIV armour but at a 6mm scale I don’t think it matters too much if I use MK6 models.

But which Chapter should I paint? A few years ago I’d painted about 50 bases of MK6 models a rather bright blue that I’ve never been happy with and the vehicles looked dreadful in that colour scheme so after an awful lot of pondering I’ve decided to go with Salamanders. Below are some quick test models showing the green colour scheme. Obviously the models aren’t quite finished:

Rhino

MK6 Space Marines

The green is quick and easy to paint and looks good in the flesh as opposed to my photos which look washed out. I realise that Salamanders have black shoulder armour but I’m not 100% sure if I want to go down that route on my MK6 models yet.

I’ll worry about getting hold of the rarer models such as Fellblades, Glaives and the like later on once I’ve got the basics painted.

Steel Legion

When EpicA first came out I cobbled together a Steel Legion army using vehicles from my SMv1 era Imperial Guard mixed in with Epic40k era vehicles. I was never keen on how the army looked with half of it looking Heresy era and half of it looking quite modern in terms of design. As the years passed I decided that my SMv1 Imperial Guard vehicles would be used as a Heresy era Imperial Guard army only and my Epic40k and EpicA era Imperial Guard vehicles would be used for my Cadian Shock Troops and Minervan Tank Legion armies. My Steel Legion army would instead be built using vehicles from the SMv2 era and only using vehicles with the very flat chassis armour pictured below:

I’m not quite sure how I managed to end up with so many of these vehicles from this particular range given that I wasn’t actively collecting them. However, I did recently buy the Chimera variants (Chimerro and Chimerax) on ebay for a very reasonable price to finish the army off.

Sculpted by Norman Swales and Dave Andrews, this is my least favourite range of Imperial Guard vehicles. The flat chassis armour coupled with minimal detail just looks so flat and boring. There is also the issue of bad mould slippage on both sides of the chassis armour. It ranges from barely any to so much you’ll never get it cleaned off and, unfortunately, it’s pretty bad on half of the vehicles I own. Amazingly it’s even on the White Dwarf advert for the Basilisk:

And worse than that some of them have double mould lines. Again this can be seen in an advert for White Dwarf:

It’s really quite shocking to see these sorts of problems in adverts for the models when they’ve just been released.
I usually dive in with a needle file for this sort of work but I found that using a very sharp knife to scrape the worst of the mold slippage off gave a better result. Even so, not all of the mould lines could be cleaned and I’ll just have to reluctantly live with them.

After all of that moaning, imagine my surprise when painting these models that they’re not only quick to paint but, gasp(!), I they look really great. Once the whole army is painted it’ll have a very coherent look to it. The intention was to paint the army as a modern Russian force but the colourscheme looked a bit bland on the test model I painted (no photo, it was quickly stripped and repainted) so I went with an olive green colourscheme. I like it but it it did occur to me that it’s quite close to the Space Marine Salamander Chapter colours.  Unfortunately, there’s no photo of the models I painted (6x Basilisks and 4x Manticores) because when I applied my Army Painter Anti-Shine Matt Varnish it dried horribly and now those ten models are sat in the stripping queue. I’m not impressed, moreso given that I checked the varnish on a test model first which dried perfectly. Very annoying..!

Although this range is fairly comprehensive it’s missing an appropriate Bombard sculpt. I own quite a lot of the Mk1 Bombard models so I converted three Bombards that would fit more with this range using three spare chassis from this range and the original Mk1 Bombard guns. A lot of the detail was filed off the Mk1 Bombard guns to keep the simple, flat, look of this range:

It’s really not a great photo because the model isn’t that green or shiny but I wanted to upload what I’d done to make the Bombard.

Finally, I did a quick check of how many Epic Imperial Guard and Space Marine vehicles that are now in my collection. I’ve now amassed 716 Imperial Guard and 297 Space Marine vehicles with more working their way to me in the post. That’s twice what I thought and I’m now not going to count my Ork vehicles nor am I going to tell my wife! 😉 Before you ask just over 200 are painted. If I pull my finger out I’m sure I can get another hundred or so painted this year.

Minervan Armoured Legion

Like a lot of wargamers I ‘ve got too many projects on the go and I dip in and out of them as the mood takes me. One project I’ve been working on on a very ad-hoc basis is building a Minervan Armoured Legion for as little money as I can manage while I concentrate on my main Epic projects; Vraks and Krieg.

The Minervan Armoured Legion is a fun project because, unsurprisingly, you get to field a wide variety of tanks. Not only that but there’s a lot of scope to convert the Leman Russ variant tanks available for use with this army. Some of might be thinking why would I want to convert the tanks when the Forgeworld models are reasonably readily available? There are three reasons for this:

Firstly, I’m not willing to pay what some of these Forgeworld tanks go for on the second hand market. For example, Leman Russ Tank Destroyers for an average for £8-10 each? That’s far too pricey for me!

Secondly, (this is going to make me sound a bit weird) I like my tank sculpts within an army to look coherent, particularly the tracks. I realise that in a real world conflict involving armoured vehicles are all shapes and sizes but on the wargames table I like a nice coherent look if I can achieve that. Moving swiftly on…

Thirdly, Forgeworld didn’t release sculpts for the Leman Russ Annihilator or Exterminator variants, although the Annihilator variant isn’t in the Minervan Armoured Legion.

I skimmed through the army list and decided to convert three Leman Russ Exterminators using some broken Leman Russ Tanks I won on ebay:

How did I convert them? When I got hold of my Vraksian Malcador tanks they came with two types of guns meaning that they could be built as either the standard Malcadors or Malcador Annihilators. I’m intending to only build three of the Malcadors as Annihilators leaving me with seven of the below Annihilator guns:

The mold slippage is quite bad on some of them, which is surprising given how cleanly cast the tanks are, but these guns are actually very quick to clean up. To remove the Lascannon look the Annihilator guns have I filed down the angular barrel. I think it works enough, this is 6mm scale after all!

Next up will be converting Executioner, Destroyer and Thunderer variants which don’t actually look to difficult to achieve.

Putting it together

I’ve not had a lot of hobby time  this week but I managed to squeeze in building my Novan Dictum Command Centre. I was pleasantly surprised at just how quick it was to build as there was almost nothing to clean up on the model and the gaps were easily filled with a bit of green stuff. I don’t think I spent more than ten minutes putting the model together from start to finish and it looks great in bare metal:

One bit of advice I would give is that the plug on the main turret is very small in comparison to what it plugs into:

I filled the bit it plugs into with a blob of greenstuff to ensure a good fit.