Miniatures Gallery
Benjamin Durbin's Imperial Guard Praetorian Army
I was talking to one of the guys I met at the 2000 GT who told me about a comic book shop that recently relocated-- and when they moved their inventory, they uncovered some old armorcast models. I raced up to Kenosha and picked up a Reaver and a Phantom. Problem was, I didn't really want a Phantom. I was really hoping for a Baneblade. Lucky me-- I sold the Phantom to Andy and got his old Baneblade as part of the trade (see batrep 016 for pics of the prior paint job).
Here's what the original baneblade looks like (pic is from www.armorcast.com) and you may want to refer back to it to see the changes I made.
A couple of things jumped out at me here. First, the turret battlecannon barrel looks too "fake." The hull battlecannon is too short (although this is likely the Demolisher option) and I didn't care for the "presentation" either. The hull heavy bolter (just under the turret battlecannon) is excessively weedy. The six bolters on the sides are also really weedy-- on top of the fact that Andy's paint job had globbed all over them, so they had to go. Finally, there's that little ball shaped cupola on the front. I have NO idea what it is supposed to be. Break out the dremel tool, it's time to start converting! Converting these resin kits is easy with a dremel tool, it just plows through the resin. (And it smells funny too! Makes me feel all light-headed! Hee hee hee!)
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The side bolters were pulled out and thrown away. I made new bolter mounts from the front of the searchlights, and using regular space marine bolters. I drilled some holes and pushed in some nail heads to give the sides a bit more of an armored look. The winged skull icon you see there is the top of a space marine banner pole, just filed flat on the back side. |
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Here you can see the beefier heavy bolter from
the Landspeeder sprue. Just below that, you can see where I filed off that little ball
thing and added the front hatch of a rhino. Later I will paint that red and add the
Praetorian lion rampant. Above that door is a piece of sprue I added as an armor beam-- I
had to file off the windows that were there before. Too many windows. You can also see here the new demolisher cannon piece I added, which has a bit more detail to it. Of course I had to snap off and file away all remnants of the original resin gun to fit this in. That second piece I am holding there can be added to the barrel of the demolisher if I want to field two battlecannons (which would be most of the time). |
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So there we have the "normal"
baneblade... but we're not done yet. You can see on top of the main turret I filed down
the old hatches and drilled it out. I have several spare hatches (see pic below) and some
tank crew to add. This baby is going to have a Praetorian commander sitting on top.
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| But I had two extra hatches I really wanted to
use... Hmm... I took the lascannons off, and realized I could drop the extra hatches
there. Of course that left me with the problem of missing two lascannons... So I had to
build some forward mounted lascannon sponsons!
A little hard to make out here, but you can see how the side sponsons are attached. When I assembled the sponson I drilled a hole through the cylinder "scoop" in the main plate of the sponson. I picked up a couple of plastic screws and wing nuts at the hardware store. The screw goes through the sponson and is glued down. Then the head of the screw was filed down a bit so the cylinder still had room to turn. The whole thing goes through a hole in the side armor and is attached with a simple wing nut. |
 Much nicer! A sleeker, more land-raiderish look to it. |
| Uh oh. I took a look over my Inquisitor #18
and realized I was dangerously close to having a Stormhammer! Take off the hatches, put on
all four lascannons and both battlecannons and voila! Stormhammer! All of the extra pieces will fit right inside the body of the tank when they are not in use. All I have left to do is to add a bit of Praetorian red, some insignia, and a few more details. I wonder how much I could sell this for on eBay? Hmmm... |
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