Steel Legion Bomber - Imperial Hell Talon

Just came across the Spikey bits website contest called “Holiday Shopping Spree Conversion Contest.” You can check out their facebook photo album here for all the entries. Not sure if I will make it, but I thought I would give it a go!

http://blog.spikeybits.com/2012/11/win-one-of-five-holiday-shopping-sprees.html

Anyway the contest is looking for something original in a form of a 40k vehicle. Sweet! I have just the thing! I have decided to enter my scratch built Imperial Hell Talon which I made a couple of years ago for an apocalypse tournament in a local gaming club.

At that time my team mates and I decided that air superiority is essential to our battle plans (this is before GW released the plastic valkyries ), so I went about looking for options to build some flyers. Flipping through the Forgeworld armour books I came across the Chaos Hell Talons flyer. I have always wondered why the Imperial Navy never have something of a medium fighter plane. So my answer; build an imperial mid fighter.
Maybe it’s an experimental flyer originally developed in a certain forgeworld planet captured by chaos forces and then reversed engineered and became the Chaos Hell Talons as they are today in the world of 40k? Who knows…

The Design: Ever since watching Raiders of the Lost Ark, I grew a certain fondness to the experimental Luftwaffe “flying wing” in the movie. Though fictional of course, I realized later the “flying wing” design is probably based on a real “flying wing” called the Horten V developed by the Luftwaffe in WW2. And since my forces are already looking like the WW2 german army, it’s a no brain-er for me to adopt this type of aesthetics to compliment my steel legion force.

Using the Horten V as my inspiration, I build a larger then usual Imperial Navy Thunderbolt hull and then designed large wings on both sides by hand until I get the shape that I am happy with. If you must know, the main hull and wings of the project is built from cardboard (cereal box and foam board)

I then glue some turbines from the space marine drop pods to the front to act as air intakes and trusters to the rear from the space marine landspeeder which are glued to some reticulation bits from the garden. The engines pipes were made from cutting bending straws (Those are always cool for scratch built projects, as it gives you that industrial look). Finally, I added the weapons from the imperial guard heavy weapons spru, base coat in chaos black and it's ready for paint. 

During the duration of the project I actually built 3 in tandem and came up with an apocalypse formation datasheet. Here is a shot from the tournament of the flyers in action.

As always, good luck in your scratch building
Capt. Stainguard 

Steel Legion Heavy Weapons Team

During 4th edition, it is not uncommon to have a heavy weapons team like the missile launcher team, to have the loader and the shooter based separately. With 6th edition however, they need to be based on a single large base. Here is a simple way to make your miniatures current (if they are base separately), as well as avoiding the pains of ripping your existing miniatures from their original 28mm bases.

I used a 5mm thick foam board and traced a circle off the large base with a pencil. Cut the foam board out, using the trace as a guide with a stanley knife. Then take the small 28mm base and have it traced inside the larger base.  Cut these out as well.

Glue the foam board to the large base (I used the old thin large base. This technique is also applicable to the new larger bases. This will no doubt make your overall miniatures stand taller). You can score the foam board using the stanley knife and a pencil to create a tile pattern or just leave as is. Texture and paint the base to finish off.

Now you have an interchangeable large base that fits two existing 28mm based miniature.

As always good luck in your scratch building
Capt. Stainguard

Space Marine Drop Pod Rubble

Many years ago, GW released a scratch build template through their website before they started selling their mass produce plastic space marine drop pods in stores. These fabled templates are still floating around the net and if you stumbled across them, you might want to give them a try, but the amount of extra plastic bits needed to finish the project to a high standard, might put you off. Not for the faint hearted!

Needless to say I made one during those days (out of a cereal box) and what I really like about them is; it’s based on the Dreadnaught drop pod variant and distinctly different from the infantry drop pods. Nice and chunky and it looks like, you could fit 10 space marines.

During the weekend I found some extra templates which I had printed out long ago and decided to start scratch building these drop pods again. I had planned to make a table top with a “drop pod landing battlefield theme” with pods scattered all over. First off, this will provide plenty of terrain to block line of sight and secondly it will give me a really cool battlefield scenery as well. My plans were set back when I made the doors to the pod a little too big (it was printed at a wrong scale! Gosh!) And after all that cutting, the pieces does not fit and everything just looks wrong. What a waste of a day...i thought

I pulled all 3 doors apart and looked at them. I then decided not to waste such a good component (after all that cutting!) and started gluing them to some old CDs I have lying around.
The results were quite promising. I started to texture the base with sand using PVA glue and then basecoat the entire terrain in black. I added some brown mix and repainted the whole thing in codex grey.

I now have some drop pod rubble to go with my soon to be, ambitious drop pod battlefield theme.
I wonder if I will every get around to make more drop pods. :P

Here is wishing you good luck in all your scratch building
Capt. Stainguard

The 44th Steel Legion Commander

I converted my own captain dubbed Captain Stainguard at the time to lead my 44th Steel Legion army.  This is basically a Morheim based plastic miniature with both arms from a generic commissar model. The head is replaced with a metal head from the tank commander miniature. I have to confess I did not paint this model as it was painted by a really good friend of mine. (and it is still the best painted model I have in my collection).

The 44th Steel Legion Imperial Guard

After surfing the net for steel legion conversions, I have come to a realization I have made some weird and wacky conversions of my own over the years to expand my steel legion miniature range. Funny enough, my first 40k miniatures are actually 10 Steel legion imperial guard miniatures available in stores during the Armageddon campaign and not space marines. 

My first squad is painted simply with chaos black undercoat, codex grey, scorched brown and boltgun metal to lasguns muzzles. Thus the 44^th Steel legion imperial guard was born!
 

When the steel legion miniatures were released, it came with some standard poses and a limited range of special weapons. It was not as versatile as the plastic Cadian range of the 6^th edition, and all we had during that time was either the metal imperial guard range of the different regiments and the Catachan plastic range.  Then came a very clever "Red Shirt" named Travis, who educated me about the “tithe guard”, so I began to adding Catachan and Valhalan  miniatures to my range to make it a rag-tag fighting force. 

This started me into the world of imperial guard conversion and I was adamant to convert models that were missing from the classic steel legion range