Converting your Steel Legion Troops

I did say in my earlier post that I have made some weird and wacky conversions of my own over the years to expand my Steel Legion miniature range. 

So without further a due, here are some of my Steel Legion trooper conversions.

Let me just say first off, converting metal steel legion miniatures can be a real pain! (don’t really like cutting metal mini’s) Most of my conversions are basically assembling plastic with metal.

sergeant, missile launcher trooper and reloading lasgun clip trooper

The best models to use are the sergeant body and the trooper who is pulling something from his pouches and the missile launcher mini. 

Converted flag bearer, kneeling plasma gunner and trooper lobbing grenade

This is because the arms are loose and you can fit them with any arm to suit, or the arms are easy to remove. Unfortunately for the ease of conversion, you will have to buy lots of the sergeant bodies for your conversions, which is why I like the trooper conversion best.

Steel Legion Flamer Trooper

 

The flamer was one of my first conversions. My opinion, the best arsenal in the guard army, which the steel legion range is lacking! Pretty standard muzzle cut off replace with flamer muzzle and a small tank attached to the back of trooper from the old tank accessory spru and a piece of wire.

The rest were basically the same but I vary some with just having the smaller canister from the flamer spru straight from the plastic Catachan range glued under the magazine clip of the lasguns.

One of the most recent and ambitious conversions, is to fit the plastic Cadian flamer weapon to a steel legion trooper. This requires lots of precision and careful cutting to remove the lasgun. Once removed, you might need to chip the sides a bit more to fit the flamer into the trooper’s hand

The flamer too, will need to be cut to suit the hand. The final thing is to add the promethium tanks behind the trooper. You might need to cut/shave a little of the back of the trooper to get a nice flat surface to glue the tanks to the back of the body.

  

Putting the tanks and the flamer component together with the metal trooper is fiddly but not impossible. Believe me it’s worth the effort! And there you go; a steel legion flamer trooper. 

Steel Legion Plasma Gunners

 

The models used for these troops are the kneeling missile launcher trooper and the leaning forward trooper. The missile launcher fella is easy to convert as it only take a hand swap and adding some binoculars on the other hand. The second conversion is a little more challenging as it requires you to remove the entire lasgun barrel on the trooper before adding the plastic plasma gun (this one took me a long time to do!).

Steel Legion Meltagunners

Meltaguns are also difficult to convert if you are using any of the generic steel trooper with a lasgun. My initial meltagun conversions are basic the removal of the lasgun muzzle replaced with a meltagun barrel at the front. I tend to cut out the plastic meltagun power coupling from the side and glue it on to the lasgun as well. 

Not my best conversion but the thought of removing another lasgun from the metal mini’s makes this conversion fairly simple.

<To be continued>

As always good luck in your scratch building

Capt. Stainguard

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

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