Armigers Done!

So I painted up some Armigers. One Moirax, two Warglaives. I've been planning to join a local slowgrow campaign, and I need those little dudes to play.

And yeah, I'll play with the big guy. He was meant to be played with; he matches my first knight for that reason! I didn't expect to win. But it's also fine, I'll only bring it out in close company. It'll be ok.

There are many custom parts on these armigers, more than meets the eye. I got a 3d printer this year, and so I've been able to design and quickly make my own parts. Here's the list of parts:

• The melee weapons, heads and tilting shields are from Taro.
• I designed shields to mount on the thermal spears. This conversion inspired me, except I designed a tall shield that resembles the Questoris weapon guard rather than graft two of them.
• I designed shin plates. Armigers legs just don't look very graceful, with those super-thin shins and weird vertical toe guards. Their feet look like those 17th century French big buckle shoes. Yuck. The plate I designed is loosely inspired on the Cerastus shin.
• I designed upper arm/elbow assemblies that match Taro's design that I used on the thermal spears. The weapons were hanging too high when attached to the shoulder directly, esp with the shields.
• I designed and printed alternative elbows for the Moirax. The original resin bits were too fiddly to magnetize.

I modelled everything in FreeCad, with a bit of Blender to give the shield a subtle bend. I printed it all on a Phrozen Mini 8k (non-S, but I hear S is better).

Next up, let's see if I'll get more Questoris or Cerastus knights. And two more Armigers are probably in order, but not for many months.

Here's a bunch of pics, including WIP. Thanks for looking!

Converting/Fixing the Primaris Repulsor Executioner

Like with the normal Primaris Repulsor, I wanted to try improving on the base model. The main Executioner heavy cannon looks great, but I find the asymmetry offputting (and I'm not the only one); and besides, the twin barrels on a large tank was a great look ever since the Mastodon tank from the old Command and Conquer games.

So I got one and modeled this bit:

Got it printed from Shapeways (you can too; I do earn a commission worth a cup of coffee if you do), and put it on the model.

Mouting the cannon was pretty difficult. I couldn't find a good way to model a latching mechanism that would work nice out of the box; the front plate of the turret needs to be cut off and made flat no matter what I did. So in the and, I gave up; I cut off the front plate of the turret, used sprues to rebuild it flat, milliput to fill out all gaps. Here's what that looked like in the end:

Then I spent a lot of time sanding it smooth:

The turret just happened to slot in perfectly after that.

As with the original Repulsor conversion, I moved the turret weapon to the chassis in place of the heavy bolters, and moved the bolters to a pair of sponsons.

Later I also decided to push the turret backwards a bit. It makes the tank look much better in person, resembling my Fellblade and Deimos Predators a bit. I had to sand off a chunk of the upper plate to make this work, and countersink the icarus stubber lower into the chassis. It also doesn't turn no more. I'm ok with that.

Other than that, it's the same conversion as before. I used the same Predator sponsons as on the original model, except these aren't magnetized since one can't mount lascannons on an Executioner for whatever reason.

Thanks for looking!

Plague Doctor Knight Conversion

Here's something I've been working on. It took a lot of work to get there; repositioning legs, inverting a left hand into right, 3D modeling fingers and hand accessories, and sculpting a faceplate.

I'm intending to build a little diorama. The current idea is that he'd be walking in a medieval town at night with a lantern. Not imposing, not dangerous, but slightly unnerving and spooky if anything. I removed all weapons and I like that look for what I'm going for.

He's still held together with bluetac, but I'm thinking about posing him kinda like in these pictures. Slowly walking, leaning on his cane to look old and fragile, lifting his lantern in anticipation of who knows what. There might be rats on the streets or something, I don't know. We'll see when we get there.

On a sidenote, I haven't been posting a lot recently, but I've been painting a lot. My Space Marine collection is crazy big now; 60+ crusaders, ~40 elites, 8 tanks, 4 dreadnoughts etc. I am working on the Fellblade now, and I feel like wrapping up that army. It'll probably be done with it within a few months, and I'm planning to take a family pic once it's done.

Here are some more pics. If you'd like to know more about something specific that I did here, please ask below. Hope you find this interesting, and thank you for looking.

Converted Fellblade!

Finally!

This was a large project. I though that the Fire Raptor was tough, and in many ways it was, but not close to this. This kit is fundamentally flawed; things just don't fit and you have to be creative.

Let's take it from the top. This is a long story, and I took a lot of pics along the way.

Fitting the turret

The turret shell came in warped into an egg shape. Here are a few pics that show what I mean by that; there's a bulge on the turret's rear right. Compare the shape of the turret with the circle that's cut into the turret platform.

Now, pretty much all resin that came in this kit was warped in some way, but the turret is the problem. It's a thick chunk of resin and you can't really heat something that thick from the inside.

So I drilled a few holes along the edge that needed to be bent inwards:

After the pic was taken, I expanded the holes a little bit and made it one continuous hole. With that, I could heat the wall that was bulging out, push it inwards, and finally sand the bottom back into a flat surface. Here's what the bottom of the turret looks like now, you can see sanding marks:

Fitting the front of the hull

The front of the hull on Fellblades is generally bad designed. A quick google search will show you numerous problems with how the front plate fits with the wheel platforms sticking out.

I don't want to link to people fitting this wrong because that's poor form in the hobby. But feel free to look at any random Fellblade online, likely you'll see that something's wrong.

I really took my time with this and I think I figured it out. The top of the tank is too short for this to fit properly. The bottom of the tank is plastic and is therefore consistent in size, while the entire upper side is made in resin, and I believe, has shrunk a bit. So to fit the front upper plate, you have to move and rotate the front vertical plate a bit backwards, and then nothing fits anymore.

Anyway, I padded the front plate with some plasticard that I believe is 1.5mm thick:

With that, the front plate could comfortably reach to sitting above the front vertical plate, so it didn't have to be pushed back, so the wheel mounts sit flush on the model:

Converting the "small" weaponry

By small, here I mean the twin heavy bolter/flamer.

As discussed here, I decided to de-twin the weapon that's normally mounted on the front plate and house them in additional turrets, for cool reasons. Since 40k Fellblades may optionally take an additional heavy bolter/flamer, I decided to use the default weapon mount to house that additional weapon.

Some dremel work and presto: all magnetized, reversible heavy bolter/flamer.

The sponsons on the side were a lot more work. It took not only a lot of manual work to install, but I designed and 3D printed turret mounts as well. Let the pics do the talking:

After some dremel work:

I intentionally designed the door-shaped sponson inserts in two parts: the inserts themselves and the sponson guards. The reason is to be able to sand the insert perfectly flush with the side of the tank without the guard getting in the way, after filling all gaps with Milliput of course. Holes that pin them together were printed too, so after the sanding was done, I could just pin the guards onto the inserts and have a perfectly symmetrical fit.

Needless to say, all small weapon options are magnetized:

Finishing touches

The tracks come with Imperial eagles all over. Those are from the Drop Pod kit and look great. Alongside all the other bits I threw around, they really make this Fellblade more of a 40k model than a 30k model.

Was it too much? I don't think so. Remember that this is not only a 40k model, but one of a Black Templars-descendant chapter. Moderation is not welcome.

I drilled the main guns and all the exhausts:

That's it!

Some glamour shots:

Getting up to this stage took about 6 weeks. It's not the only thing I worked on, but considering I had to wait for 3D prints etc, it's about ok. I'm not going to start painting immediately, I want to get my airbrush-fu to a higher stage first. I might basecoat it first just to be able to see any surface blemishes or seams that I may have missed.

If you're still reading this, thank you. Hope if was interesting or useful!