Tallarn Desert Raiders Flamer Conversions WIP

 I love my Tallarn Desert Raiders Imperial Guard Army. I will never sell it.

BUT, when GW made these guys, they decided to NOT include flamers or heavy flamers as part of the weapon loadouts.

After many ebay purchases, I have obtained quite a number of Tallarn Desert Raiders. The main box came with a Melta guy, so I have plenty of those. I also have only 2 Plasma guns, a single Grenade Launcher, and assorted heavy weapons.

BUT no flamers! Thus with all my spare time with COVID, I decided to change this with a little ingenuity. I shall explain my process below the pics. I present; 3 flamers & a heavy flamer WIP. I was encouraged by original Ogryn Conversions (here and here but they've since been rebased) and am getting more comfortable with green stuff in general.

Process Regular Flamers:

1. Purchased several flamers + 1 heavy flamer Imperial Guard bitz, including Gas Tank backpacks from ebay (pretty cheap).
2. Took 3 existing melta guns that I had purchased (the red paint job is old), and sawed off the Melta bit.
3. Also had to grind their backs a little bit to remove the head covering ends etc. to make way for the gas tank(s). Not too much is needed if you're cool with a "slouched" diagonal look to the gas tanks.
4. Took 2 flamer gas tanks, and cut them in half, carving them down so that they looked like a single tank backpack. This is to help differentiate the heavy flamer from the regular flamers on the tabletop from a distance.
5. Cut off the flamer "flame" bits from the original flamer arms and glued them onto the end of the cut down melta guns. Now the melta guns looks like flamers
6. Took 1.5mm jeweler's wire which is very flexible, and cut it down to the right length
7. Drilled shallow, roughly 1.5mm holes in the end of the gas tank as well as the bottom of the melta gun. I found the part where the other piping goes in looks logical.
8. Glued the wire into the gas tank and the melta gun
9. Hey Presto! Instant Tallarn Flamer dude

Process Heavy Flamer:

1. This guy was neat because he's actually an older missile launcher guy who was missing his missile launcher arm. I had nothing for him to do...
2. Had to grind down his shoulder a little bit and bend his holding arm, but eventually got it to a good place where it looks like he's holding the Heavy Flamer with both hands. But it's a great look
3. Grind his back a bit to accommodate the flamer tanks.
4. Glue the double gas tanks onto his back. I keep the double tanks since he's "heavy" so will need more gas, and at a distance I'll be able to easy tell he's the heavy. I'm not a HUGE fan of the heavy flamer weapon model, but that's ok. I think it would look better if it were more horizontal instead of vertical.
5. The piping almost fit, but needed a bit of hot bending, and I broke it a bit so will have to fill in with Green Stuff eventually
6. Also, since he's supposed to be holding a missile launcher against his head, I'll need to Green Stuff the side of his head to fill it out a bit. Otherwise it looks a bit flat.
7. Hey Presto! Instant Heavy Tallern Heavy Flamer dude.

Even if I don't use them in 40k which I don't really play, I could play One Page Rules Sci Fi or Kill Team.  These guys will be a great addition. I'll update once I've got the Green Stuff in place, and might have undercoated 'em.

Magnetizing Protectorate Plastic Warjack

So I finally had some time to do some modelling. I didn't do any painting, but I did magnetize the Protectorate Plastic Warjack kit. Its actually 3 heavy warjacks in 1; a Crusader, a Templar, and a Vanquisher, all of which use the heavy warjack Crusader chassis. Awesome stuff. After looking at this forum link on the Privateer Press Forum about how to magnetize the jack, I tried it myself.  These are the results. I didn't use 1/4" x 1/32" disc magnets.  I used 2 x 1/8" x 1/32" discs.

I won't go into detail on each photo, so hopefully its self evident. And at the end I have a few shots of all the options. I think it came out really well so can't wait to paint this dude up. My original Crusader is unmagnetized but my favorite figure from the Menoth army. I also used greenstuff to set the magnet for the Templar's shield, and I didn't magnetized the head. Just used the Templar head since it looks awesome. All cutting and drilling was done with a dremel round mill, and an exacto blade.

Continuing the Big Guy: Judicator

An update on the Judicator project.  I finished all the cleaning (including some that required a dremel tool).  Also green stuffed some of the more egregious pock marks and air pockets in the resin.  Here are some pics.  Still waiting for the snow to melt so I can prime everything in black. My green stuff skills are improving but still hard to use.  The photos look worse than they are.  Perhaps I should invest in better sculpting tools to get it into the cracks.

These are the mini assemblies that I will prime, paint and then glue together.  Not sure if I'll need to pin any of them.  One thing about the Warmachine 'Jacks is they have really thin mid sections. Hope the big guy doesn't break in half..

 

One of the worst pock marks required me to rebuild the pointy section to make it look Protectorate enough.  Should be good enough.

Filled in cracks here.

 Needed a dremel to remove the flash pipes on the left knee pad.  The right one is what it was "supposed" to look like.  At least it fits now.

Even if my green stuff skills are not great, at least they wont' be that visible.  Even here on the arm guards, the GS is on the bottom.

Beginning the Big Guy: Judicator Colossal

Well, I was in the office doing some 3D printing (more on that later), and figured I'd just go ahead and start the Judicator. Really cool model.  There's still lots of snow here in NY, so I can't prime any of the blank figs just yet, so its just cleaning.

Open the box, and here's what you get.  There is a huge base and even a large cardboard wreck market underneath all this.  No instruction manual, but there is a single sheet assembly sheet.  Not bad, but many of the pieces look the same, especially in the middle.  Just check out how many pieces there are for this guy.. 

Lots of pieces, and all the pieces have some kind of flash on them.  There's a few metal pieces, but most of them are a resin.

Sometimes there is so much flash that it becomes hard to know what is actually model, and what is flash.  Happily most of the pieces are doubled so you can tell what's what.  Here's one of the fists with large flash tubes on it.

Shoulder pads with loads of flash.  The resin is pretty easy to cut off, but there are sometimes small air bubbles in some of the edges.  I'll have to use greenstuff to fill them in, unless I can find a better filler.

Inner shoulder. When you cut off the flash, the parts are fantastic to look at. This dude is going to look awesome, but there are lots of large blank sheets to put some fun detail painting on.

Tallarn Ogryns Complete

I'm almost embarrassed to post given the true level of awesome that is Ghoulio's work, but here we go anyway with the finally complete Ogryn unit.
Here are the two new boys. A guy with complete head dress, and the gritty sarg with Blue sash of title. I wanted these guys to be mimicing my Tallarn humans as much as possible so their color scheme is close, and they have the Tallarn headgear, and blue "veteran" sashes. Quite pleased with how they turned out. Now all I gotta do is take some better photos. My new wife and I are moving to a place that has a rec room in the basement, so a nice place for a permanent painting space!
And a group shot since they are now a team.... a super team. Just have to paint a Commissar Lord to lead them, and a Chimera for the whole assault squad to ride in.

3 of da Ogryns is done Boss

So here are 3 of the Ogryns that I greenstuffed a month or two ago. They turned out quite well. Details I quite like are the eye pieces, and even stains on their white shirts (see the back of the middle guy), and the stubble on their chins. The headgear also turned out very well I think. I've almost finished the other 2, and then onto the last Sentinal. Can't wait to see how these guys do in battle..

Tallarn Ogryn Greens

Well, I figured it was time to try the greenstuff. I think it turned out very well. I'll be painting these guys in roughly the same colors as my regular infantry so they should meld well. As far as points go, a Chimera full of Ogryns + A Commisar Lord ends up about the same as a 3rd infantry squad, and a chimera full of more vets + meltas. So the question we need to ask is, can these guys protect the single scoring vet squad to get to its objective target? Since they count as Elite, the Ogryns will only be able to contest objectives, not hold them. Well whatever, I'm proud as anything with them.

These are the Ogryns that I plan on turning into "Desert" Tallarn. Some initial prototypes using "Sculpty III", which only hardens when you bake it. Hopefully this will be good practice for the greenstuff. Order actually goes from right to left. Rae sculpted the one on the right. And I've been trying to refine her initial design by making it a bit thinner until I got to the two variations on the left. I think they should work out quite nicely. Not sure what to do about horns in the back row though. We'll get to him eventually. Can't wait to see how these guys turn out. By all means leave constructive criticism as I've very new to this cloth sculpting thing..

Green Stuff Experiment

Ok, so I had a couple of Tallarn heavy weapon crew sitting around doing nothing, and Tallarn don't have some things that IG take for granted, like Demolition Teams and Flamer units. I have therefore ordered some flamers on eBay to convert some lucky guardsmen (if I can find more on eBay. Since IG is popular right now, its too hard to get 'em), and I think they arrived in the mail today. However, until then, my first ever experiment with greenstuff was to give these two guys high explosives that they can lob a whole 6" towards the enemy. That's right, with BS 3, these guys are almost as likely to throw the explosive BEHIND them then they are to get it on target! Good times however, and I think they came out not bad. I'll post more when they are painted. to make it more obvious will probably put stuff like DANGER or TNT on their satchels...