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

40k Apocalypse 2012

With Christmas almost upon us and some people saying that the end of the world is near,  I figure it’s only fair I  post a picture of an apocalypse game, which I had the privilege in participating a couple of years ago in a local gaming club called “Armadale Wargames” which runs almost every year now (near Christmas time), an annual apocalypse tournament since 40k Apocalypse was introduced.  

http://www.westgamer.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=24

 

This also brings to mind my very first vehicle conversion when White dwarf promoted the Vehicle Design Rules. I had the inspiration to build this monstrosity after reading one of the Gaunts Ghost novels which featured a traitor guard warmachine. Unfortunately as time passes by, I tore the model apart for parts since most of my friends were afraid to go up against it and there wasn’t much use for this model in a standard 40k game. So parts were recycled and made into other things. But today with the introduction of 40k apocalypse, I wondered how this model would have fared? 

Lucky for me I took a picture of this conversion before disassembling it in the chop-shop :P

Merry Christmas!

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 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