Saturday, August 1, 2009

Making Do With Less: Meltaguns

A return to the series as I've started painting my army in earnest. The past two days I have spent making meltagunners for the SWS and Platoon Command Squad of Hearts platoon. Since I am a budget player (har har)I purchased the meltagun bitz packs instead of buying the metal special weapons troopers. This has two problems for me:

1) The hand on the meltagun is a space marine power armor glove; ok for Grenadiers or stormtroopers, but for a normal guy might pose an aesthetic problem.
2) Getting the hand and the gun on the trooper in a way that makes sense.

I've tried a few ways, often times unsuccessfully, with my vets, so this time I had a bit more experience going in. One way that I found worked fairly well was to use the Cadian infantry sprue and select the lasgun model that does not have the hand built into the gun. All I had to do was chop the gun and hand out of the weapon piece and I had two arms that were perfect to use for my trooper. Here's how they turned out:



I don't like these the most because of the glove; if I had another glove for the other hand that would be one thing, but... eh. You can also try leaving the hand on the gun, but I found that that ran into some interesting problems with the butt of the meltagun, as well as made it a bit harder to glue into place.

The other method, that I found worked very well was to take the grenade launcher pair of hands and use them to put the meltagun together. I imagine that it would work just as well for plasmaguns/you could probably use the flamer hands as well, as it is a similar configuration.

There are really only two steps. Step one is to cut off the arm and the pistol grip of the grenade launcher.



Step two is to cut off the butt and hand on the meltagun.



Then just attach the two together. Here's the finished model:



And here's a pic of him with the 4 other meltagunners I finished today:

No comments: