Warhammer 30K’s Mechanicum units have migrated to plastic and I got a bit excited about it all. Ipored over the complex sprues, intent on figuring out the conversion capabilities of every tiny piece. I explained how toproxy the cool robotsin40K. And now I’m going one step further: big, bold conversions.
If you’ve seen my work before, which presumably is why you clicked on this article, you’ll understand that I like to smush multipleWarhammerkits together to create some messed-up monster a lá Sid from Toy Story. MyDark Mechanicus forceis getting on a bit now, with some conversions nearly a decade old, but most of them hold up. The plastic Mechanicum, however, was a chance to update my army with plenty of new monstrosities.
I started by converting a Kastelan. These are my favourite models to kitbash because of their scale. Like a small Dreadnought, they’re a large canvas that allows for creativity and expression, only needing a fist and a gun to be clear as to what it represents on the tabletop. You can have fun with them. So I chopped up a Castellax Battle-automata and got to work.
As you may see from the images – I hope that some of you actually read these words too, because I put a lot of effort into them – I’ve used about half of a Castellax. One leg, one arm, two shoulder plates, a back to front body, and a tiny head from a Thallax made up the robotic portion of my dude. I complemented that with some Nurgle belly I found in my bits box (it might be from a Pusgoyle Blightlord’s Rot Fly?) and the arm of a Rat Ogre fromSkaventide.
There’s also a whole bunch of green stuff involved (the entire back side of the cyborg is hand-sculpted), but if you want to get started with kitbashing, then I’ve got some tips.
The first is to be trigger-happy. Cut things up. Slap ‘em together. Use Blu Tack or another impermanent adhesive to test out shapes and silhouettes. Stick parts on, take them off again if they don’t work. When you’re happy with the general size and parts, get the plastic glue out and start sticking.
My philosophy is trial and error. I know it can be scary when faced with an expensive kit, but getting your hobby knife out and carving plastic is the best way to test yourself. If it goes wrong, it’s time to get out the green stuff or another plastic piece and fix the issue yourself. This possibly overconfident approach inspires creativity and problem-solving, and you start to see mistakes as opportunities.
My other tip is sausages. Layers of green stuff sausages are the building blocks for any sculpting, especially bodies of all shapes and sizes. I used a soft sculpting tool to make pock marks, indentations, and fleshy folds to give the impression of diseased skin, but sausages work for everyone from a muscular adonis to a sumo wrestler.
I tested my approach to the limits with the enormous Thanatar Siege Automata, the biggest kit in the plastic Mechanicum refresh. It’s an incredible feat of engineering, so I decided to only use its legs. I’ll save the body for another project of course, but I love utilising the Age of Sigmar Gargant in my Dark Mechanicus conversions. I fused one to a Dunecrawler back when I was first building this army, and I wanted to modernise that conversion with the Thanatar’s legs.
After spending longer on the legs than I do on most models these days, the Gargant’s body fit perfectly on top. I needed to sculpt a slightly larger lip on the belly to cover a cavernous gap, but that was it. The real work went into the arms. One was from the Gargant (although that can-do method of measuring once and chopping twice meant I had to sculpt a new shoulder muscle), and the other was an old Dreadnought leg shoved into a gap in the Gargant’s body.
I haven’t decided just yet whether I’ll use this model as an Armiger Warglaive or a Sydonian Dragoon, so I magnetised the weapon options. A Dreadnought power fist and a bare head from the Armiger completed the look. I’m still planning on adding some armour plates and maybe more green stuff cables to really tech it up, but this is taking shape already.
I’ve also made some minor alterations to the box’s Tech-thralls to become Skitarii and I’m eyeing up the lovely Triaros model wondering exactly how to Nurgle it up. Before then, however, I’ve got some moreSkavento add to my force…
