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.
chewinglead 