Two things. Firstly, I've finished the mortar squad (hooray!) - though the weather's been drizzly and it's dark now, so photos are right out. I'm fairly pleased with them, but they took too long, damnit.
Secondly, like many of us I'm boracic at the moment, so I'm trying to make my own special characters. Chief among them is G/Sgt Harker, a hardened veterans upgrade and the only real means of enabling my beloved veterans to infiltrate (one of my few gripes with the new codex). The trouble, of course, is getting a guardsman to sling a heavy bolter, when all the guard weapons are huge!
My answer (so far) was to use a chaos space marine sprue (true story: a kid in my last school left a squad's worth of CSM sprues in my cupboard and forgot about them for two years...then left the school! I never got around to chasing him up...) which had a heavy bolter on it. I scraped away the more telling iconography, and after fretting about how to carry it, I eventually settled on cutting out a chunk from the back of it and using a Cadian flamer arm, with the sling. Et voila:
I'll fill that gap in the back, but the ammo feed will hang from those two nodes in front of the pistol grip anyway.More to follow.
Cheers,
Drax.
PS: if you didn't catch my previous post, please take a look and leave your thoughts if you can. I don't usually like to ask, but without a local gaming community any feedback I get is hugely appreciated. Thanks to those of you who've left your marks already!
Interesting tactic sir- I'll be trying something similar shortly, though I might end up cheating and using Catachan parts.
ReplyDeleteLooking good so far, Drax! I'm in the midst of coming up with my own proxy models for some of the special characters as well. I've been kicking around ideas for how to make up a Harker of my own, and I may have to pillage yet another idea from you... Keep it up, I always look forward to your updates!
ReplyDeletelove the idea so far. I considered using those flamer arms when doing my plasma gunners... wish i had now, looks great!
ReplyDeleteYour Harker conversion is looking good so far. But I think it will look bad if you put the ammo feed into the holes near the pistol grip. The ammo feed location on the heavy bolter has been defined since second edition 40k. Changing it too much will just look wrong.
ReplyDeleteCheck out my version of Harker:
Gunnery Sergeant Harker on www.battlebarge.com
Thanks, chaps!
ReplyDelete@ The Goat:
Wow - yours is stunning, and I can't possibly hope to come close to that! Nice work, mate.
I can't put the ammo feed where you suggested as it's too long. I'll try to post pics tonight to demonstrate, though I've glued it now. It unbalanced the mini too much and made the ammo almost drag on the floor.
Besides, I have at least seven different styles of heavy bolter in my force already - what's another, between minis?!
- Drax.
Looking good so far! 40K machinery like Bolter technology is constantly converted and tinkered with in the fluff. Who cares if the ammo feed is somewhere else? If it makes sense where you're putting it, then do so.
ReplyDeleteLooking forward to the finished model. I've also been thinking on making a Cadian Harker ... though my initial plans involved using a SM Scout Heavy Bolter + arms. The shoulders are passable for Cadian shoulder plates...
Thanks.
ReplyDeleteYeah, we'll see. if it looks too much like it has two ammo feeds, I'll sack it, but...well...we'll see.
I was going to opt for the SM scout version if this hadn't worked, though I've not looked at it. Let us know, won't you?
I like how your harker's coming.
ReplyDeleteI had an old Steel Legion trooper that the previous owner had cut out his lasgun and put on a Heavy Stubber for use in Necromunda.
I'm thinking of putting an ammo crate of some kind onto his stubber, and call it his Hbolter. It's close enough. I'll have to post pics of him sometime.
I had thought of mixing SM scouts with Hbolters and cadian/catachan bits... except I don't have cadians or catachans in my menagerie of old metal troops