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!

Fire Raptor Assembled!

The Fire Raptor is done and ready to be painted. This was a lot of work!

First off, my Forgeworld kit was terrible. I can deal with mold lines, but I had some extremely bad mold slips in there too. The front piece that surrounds the Avenger gatling cannons, the top part of the chassis near the end of them model, and the angled stabilizer wings above the engines, were in terrible shape. After fixing them, if you line them up, you can see that they're not equal anymore, from all the material I had to cut off. But it's hard to tell with a naked eye and that's good.

I know that they say that Forgeworld offers excellent customer service, but it would take forever for replacement parts to come to me. I opted to just do the best with what I got instead. Sadly I don't have any pics of fixing them up.

The gatling gun panel was seriously misaligned, so I had to sand its edges down on both sides and practically rebuild its sides and integrate it into the model. There's the end result. It looks a bit rough but if reels smooth to the touch. I think it'll be fine after priming. Otherwise I can just go back to it, sand some more, and re-prime until fixed.

I didn't glue the cockpit mask to the model because of the acrylic glass that I don't want to risk getting any paint on. I'll probably glue that on after painting the rest of the model.

I didn't like the normal feet that the Fire Raptor kit comes with. They're long and spread apart. I wanted the model to keep a lean profile.

So I used the plastic feet that come with the Storm Raven kit instead of resin parts. I shortened them to make the model rest very low against the floor, and rear legs are pointing straight down instead of to the side, compared to the stock model. I'm happy with how this turned out.

Of course, both weapon turrets are magnetized. I drilled holes in the turret and used magnets as pins that align the weapon a bit better, besides 6 5x2mm magnets in each turret that keep the weapons firmly in place.

Note that one of the Heavy Bolter weapons has a lot of Milliput (the white stuff) in the third picture below. That weapon came to me hollow. There was a thin, translucent resin shell giving it shape. Whoever was pouring resin there didn't see a massive air bubble. I just filled it with Milliput.

Wing weapons are magnetized too. While the official rules give you the option of equipping your Fire Raptor with missiles or lascannons, the kit doesn't come with lascannons. Only the Storm Eagle kit gets lascannon bits. I don't know what's up with that. Anyway, I designed and 3D printed some lascannon bits to use.

Finally, the wings can be removed, as well as the little stabilizer thing on the top of the model. For easier transport.

This part I'm not too happy with. Instead of buying huge magnets that will have the strength to keep the wings tight to the model, I just used multiple stacks of normal modelling magnets (up to 6mm big). This worked out but it looks very messy and, while the wings don't move, I'd like to have a stronger hold in there. I've since ordered some very strong rectangular magnets - plates that are 20x10x2mm. I wish I had used those. Oh well.

That's it. Can't wait to get started with this thing, I've never painted anything nearly as big. This thing makes my Monolith look like a joke. We'll see how it goes.

Thanks for looking!