Legion: Stinger conversion WIP

     The 4 Shredders that come in the Legion battlebox and the Hordes 2 player battlebox are typically more than you'll ever want to field at one time. One of the 4 I converted into a Harrier using the smallest set of wings from an Angelius. That left 3 Shredders still. I decided to keep 2 as Shredders and convert the third to Legion's third type of lesser warbeast, the Stinger.

 

      The main differences between the two are that the Stinger has a much longer tail with a big spikey point on it and that the head has armored scales on it that come to a point, as well as the main head spike being angled back more. The fire too of course but I was going to omit that for simplicity sake much like this Stinger on the right.
   








Well, I don't have any Stinger bits just lying around to use for this conversion, so I had to think of something else. The tail of the Raek model is very similar to that of the Stinger but I don't want to go chopping off the tail of my beautiful painted Raek model.

The solution? Cast the end section of the tail and pin it onto the Shredder model. For bits casting I've been using Instant Mold for a couple years to pretty good success. If you haven't heard of it, check it out. It's awesome stuff and highly useful in this hobby. So the first thing I went about doing was casting the tail of the Raek.







The cast actually didn't come out that great which is in part due to it being pretty difficult to get a good mold off the Raek model. Eh, it'll work I guess. If it was on a larger, showcase model like the Angelius of something similar, I probably would have made a new mold and cast it again.While casting I put a small piece of brass rod in the middle to give it more strength, make it somewhat bendable, and make it easy to attach to the Shredder model.

After cutting the tip of the Shredder tail off and attaching the new tail, I started in on the armor plating on the head. I used milliput to sculpt armor plating on the top of his head and bring it to a point. This is the first pass with the putty. After a bit of refining and sanding of the milliput, I reattached the head spike angling it back a bit more and got the model prepped for priming.

I cut out a large portion of the inside of the base and attached a new flat piece of plastic to the underside of the base and sealed up the edges with putty. I'll be using this to create an effect of the ice surface being broken through in that area of the base. The model is now all prepped, primed, and ready for paint.