Well, it took a combined total of twelve hours in design and test building after a friend let me borrow the plastic kit to measure, but I can now make Nephilim fighters out of four sheets of letter sized printed cardstock instead of a ridiculously overpriced kit from GW ($75 for two sprues of plastic).  Send me an email if you want the PDF.  I also have cut files for the Silhouette desktop cutting machine if you have one of those handy.  Also keep in mind I’m for hire if you want anything commissioned in papercraft.

Jarl Kurk Thunderfoot in artificer armor.  Since I use pistol weaponry as the rifle versions, I had to hunt down an old style plasma pistol to differentiate between which was which.

Barney here is a Rogue Trader era (1987) Dreadnought with twin linked autocannon arms made from imperial guard heavy weapons team autocannons, greenstuff and some extra eldar weapons shields.  I think I went a bit overboard on the knotwork.

People will often criticize the old style of 40k, but with just a bit of conversion, it can still be usable with the newer models.  I’m quite pleased with how the conversion part of this build went as well as the final look of it.  I will have to go in and clean up the highlights at some point before I can actually call the piece finished.

And last but not least are my sniper scouts.  These are completely unaltered Ratling Snipers.  I’ve seen the older ratlings, and these guys are much more dwarfish in size than they are.  It’s almost as if they were intended for Squat snipers and were quietly reclassified by Games Workshop so they could still be released without causing a fuss.  I absolutely love the little sculpted details about the minis here.  One has an eldar soulstone as a charm.  Another has a half eaten bag of apples and cheese behind him and a discarded apple core at his feet.  Some of them have little rat skulls collected as trophies (I imagine they’d be hard to hit at a distance with a sniper rifle, thus would the skull prove their skill with the weapon).  They also come five to a $20 blister, which is one of the few bargains you’ll still find from GW.

So I decided my Emperor’s Knuckles Space Marine army (Squats, AKA spess dorfs) needed another HQ choice to go with the terminators I made.  My original plan was to get another 2nd edition plastic terminator sergeant and bling it out to make a captain, but then I came across this fellow:

This is a 1st edition Space Hulk Terminator Librarian from the Genestealer expansion.  Being plastic was a plus, as converting it was a breeze.  I didn’t even really need to shorten the legs by that much since the model is a fair bit smaller than the current terminator armored figs anyway.  The arms were another story, as they seemed to have been sculpted in a larger proportion than the legs, so I had to relocate them as well.  I got the dwarf parts from this guy:

Unfortunately, Finecast, despite being fragile when you drop it, is actually pretty hard to cut into if you want to do an extensive mod like this.  I ended up having to cut off the bits of the guy I wanted in larger chunks with a sprue cutter before whittling out what I could with a hobby knife and finally breaking out the dremel tool to get to the finer points.  Freeing up the beard from the pistol was a chore in itself.  I wanted to keep the geared hammer and replace the axe head of the force weapon as well as a few of the runic pouches, charms and random bits from the backpack.  Here’s how he came out.

And here he is with the terminator squad.  Due to librarians wearing blue armor and my characters having little red toboggans, he came out looking a bit reminiscent of Papa Smurf.

I’ll take some better pictures later, but here’s the first of five terminator armor clad squats for my Emperor’s Knuckles space marine army.  I have a standard power armor squat and a Dark Vengeance terminator in the pic for scale reference.  The squat terminators are made from the second edition plastic terminators with the thigh from the legs chopped down and the shoulders dropped a bit.  A single power armor pauldron was used to close the faceplate.  While not being that much shorter overall than a standard terminator figure, they do make it seem as if the wearer wouldn’t be that tall due to the lowered arms and hidden face.

So I discovered this model kit while browsing Ebay a few months ago and decided to pick one up on a whim.  It was about $30 after shipping.  The box art may say “Metal Bug”, but this is without a doubt the tank from the Metal Slug series of games.  I used to love playing Metal Slug back in the day, and thought it would be a great addition to the Emperor’s Knuckles army as a counts-as predator tank.  I wasn’t certain about the scale at the time, but as you can see in the photo below, it is in scale with 28MM figures.

The problem with trying to use this tank as a counts-as in 40k comes when you realize that despite being in scale, it is supposed to be a small tank and all the tanks in Warhammer are Xbox huge.  I ended up keeping the color scheme from the games with a lot of added weathering.

Now, the name gives away the fact that this is an obvious bootleg kit.  Knowing that, I was expecting the parts not fitting together too well, but that wasn’t so much of a problem with MOST of the kit.  The vulcan cannons on the side did not fit well, so moving them around would have been impossible without having to constantly pull them off and push them back over the pegs.  I opted for using magnets installed into the holes in the round part of the cannons and on the ends of the pegs.  This made the cannons stick out to the side an extra eighth of an inch, which is actually a good thing, since the natural placement was too close to the main turret.

Another gripe about the kit is the effort they took to make the turret have a dual ball joint connection that was supposed to give it mobility, yet the design of the pistons does not allow it to move at all.  I thought about getting mechanical pencil springs and using them to make the pistons hinged and mobile, but there would have been no good place inside the hull wells to secure them.  The makers of this kit would have been better off to either have the pistons not extend all the way into the turret or just design it so it doesn’t rotate in the first place.  It was difficult and quite frustrating to get the ball joints in place only to realize the rest of the kit restricts any sort of movement.

One plus of the kit is it’s attention to detail.  There are a lot of parts to the engine and suspension that are present, though they are not seen on the finished model.  I would expect this from a higher end historic tank kit, and I personally enjoyed the extra detail it provides, but most people who would just want the model to look the part for a desk decoration or game piece will just be annoyed by all the extra fiddly bits.  More extras are a little metal bullet that doesn’t really fit the scale of the tank, but the loophole on the back means its probably supposed to be a keychain charm.  Decals were included, but I chose not to use them on my build.

Here’s the Blood Ravens recolor of my papercraft Stormtalon template.  I built this in about three hours.  Owning a Silhouette SD cutting machine really helps cut back on the time it takes to make papercraft models once you know how to program the cut lines.  I’ll do a tutorial on it later.

I built the Contemptor Dreadnought from plans made by Eli patoroch.  I had to modify the arms a bit since it seems the weapon arms did not include a part for the joint between the guns and the shoulder.  The foot part was also colored incorrectly on his template.  Some of the parts were inverted, which I corrected in the recolor I did.  A few of the parts required tabs which were not present.  Still, mad props to the guy for making such an awesome kit into paper.  I plan on giving this to another player who’s been wanting one, but is having difficulty paying rent, much less ordering stuff from Forgeworld.

If anyone wants a copy of my modified plans with the corrections I mentioned (including dual autocannon arms and silhouette automated cutting paths) just email me and i’ll send it to you.

I just finished my test build for a papercraft template to make Stormtalons.  The engines and assault cannon turret rotate on the model.  I’ll go back later and add in the other weaons options once I get a few built.  As it stands, its actually a pretty simple model to build at only 3 pages of parts.  Once I get the Silhouette programmed to cut out the parts in the template I’ll have a few squadrons together in no time.

Here’s two figures I painted up for a friend at the local gaming shop.  Dude painted his Black Reach dread up so bad I told him I’d re-paint it free of charge just to help him out.  My thought was that if he had a nicely painted centerpiece to the army, he might try and take a bit more time painting the rest of it to match instead of just splotching white and red paint on his figures in a few areas.  He mentioned wanting to try out a chaplain, so the figure here was built from random leftover parts in my bits box.  Plague marine head modified to be a skull helm, Fantasy staff and backpack decorative bit made into a crozius.  I like to modify the backpacks on chaplains to have skulls for the exhaust vents.  You can see the freehand on his chapter symbol shoulder, but there’s also a neat looking painted skull that takes up his entire right shoulder as well.  All in all I’m pleased with how they came out.  

I still have to go back and make the jewels inserted into the left skyboard orange, but other than that, these two hellions are now done.  THe one on the right is riding the decorative skyboard from an earlier post.

I’ve been working on the Emperor’s Knuckles a bit more.  Currently, I have a captain with plasma pistol and power sword, chaplain, 2 power fist sergeants, three bolter marines and three pistol and chainsword guys.  I plan on adding about fourteen more marines for the time being.  One of the guys over at the local shop ended up with a couple of classic Rogue Trader era heavy weapons, so I’m resin casting the rocket launcher, heavy bolter, plasma cannon and lascannon to make a heavy weapons team.  I have three of the knucklecarts I showed in one of the previous posts, and I plan on getting two more to make a squad of five.  For vehicles I have:

vindicator made from a rhino kit, a sherman tank turret and the metal demolisher cannon from the old Leman Russ kit.

2 classic rhinos

2nd edition metal land speeder (a second is in the mail on it’s way to me)

a Robogear Condor to use as a land speeder typhoon.  The same guy that gave me the classic heavy weapons also gave me the torso for an old squat figure to use as a pilot.  The cockpit area of the kit was just an empty slot, so I used the inner cockpit part from a Venom.  I’ll get better pics of this later as the Condor is a really nice kit despite being only $8 (though shipping from Russia takes a long time).

And last but not least is an old “Chuck” dreadnought from the Rogue Trader days.  I’ve constructed some twin-linked autocannon arms for him using a bunch of Imperial Guard heavy weapons leftovers hacked together and some eldar bits.  The original Melee arm and lascannon are still usuable, as I’ve magnetized the arm mounts to move around and drilled the inserts to use styrene rods to peg the options I’m using in place.  After slapping it on a scenic base, it doesn’t look too out of place, even compared with a modern dreadnought.