WIP: Broadside Conversion

December was a productive month for me (by my standards anyway).  I made lots of progress on my Grey Knights, and the long vacation gave me some time to knock out some good modelling work on some new Tau stuff.


All these Tau posts from Trip were making me miss my little blue-skinned friends. I decided to shelve the GK boys for a little while and break out the sandpaper and drill bits to bolster my main army a bit.  I've got a new squad of Fire Warriors coming along nicely (primed, preshaded, based, and highlighted), and am taking pictures for a proper step-by-step on them. As soon as my new paint order arrives with my cloth color, I'll kick that project in to high gear. For now, here's my developments on my first (real) Broadside.

It's nice to work on these new kits- the molds are in such better shape than the old ones, and as Trip has pointed out, they make much better use of the space on the sprues, and the parting lines and gates are in better places.  Good to see they finally found a good vendor in China. The Broadside parted out quickly and required less cleanup than I'm used to.  I was still disappointed in the lame head options so first order of business was to make a better head.

The kit comes with 3 heads, and 3 different fronts for one of those.  They were all too tiny in my opinion so I set about mashing something together.  In the end, I cut the round base off of two of them and glued them together to create this square-jawed beast.  I think it's much more indicative of his strength and brute status, and it was a pretty easy conversion.

Next step was to do something about the silly boxing glove setup for the HYMP.  Trip pointed out this tutorial by K'tano on Advanced Tau Tactica.

Courtesy of K'tano on ATT

It's a great start, but I wanted the option of using either gun setup.  I'm a sucker for magnetizing. Using that conversion as a base, I added magnets to make the weapons interchangeable. As you can see, it works fine with the HYMP, but the added plastic to hold the magnets makes the Rail Gun a little clunky- just a random spacer with none of the nice detail on it.

To fix that, I created a little sheath to go over it out of styrene (plasticard) sheet.  I'm lucky enough to have access to a laser cutter, but this could be easily done by hand, minus the little slots on top. As soon as the aforementioned paint order shows up (along with some nifty scratch build parts I ordered), I'll throw a couple of Tau-like slotted screw details on the corners, and we'll have ourselves a pretty nifty conversion. Can't wait to start painting this thing!

Whatcha think, kids?
~Deet