So I happened upon these models on eBay and at a glance they seemed uniquely suited to my purposes. I snatched them up and what a deal, I must say. All of the Space Marines have the driver chest piece with the cog sigil, as well as the Mechanicus shoulder pads. When the models arrived, I was pleasantly surprised to see that all the bolter marines had SM Scout Biker combi-bolters. The close combat marines had a variety of bits, including two of the old Blood Angels Honour Guard tech-axes, two each of Space Wolves power axes and swords.
Now unfortunately, these guys were assembled poorly and pained sloppily. Worse, even though they all sport the cog shoulder pad it is on the wrong side of the model. I carefully snapped all the arms off of the figures. They had quite a few layers of paint that a brake fluid bath took care of nicely. Once they came out, there were blobs of superglue revealed everywhere.
I did my best to scrape it out where I could.
Meanwhile, having this lot of marines arrive meant that the time had arrived to get some more heavy weapons, in the form of a SM Devastator box. I really can't say too much more to sell it than eight heavy weapon options. I've started out with the heavy bolters, since my first ever 40k figure was one of the 3rd edition versions of the same.
The challenge that the heavy weapons present is that they all have shoulder pads moulded as part of the sculpt. They also happen to be in the same wrong place for my amry... time to break out the razor saw.
It took a bit of doing, but I managed to get the pads replaced on the heavy bolters. The first taught me quite a bit about how to screw it up, but some greenstuff will fix that. The second went much smoother. Seen here as well are the bits for a missile launcher Devastator. I have a second set prepped somewhere. These were much more straight forward to convert once the moulded in shoulder pad was removed, just insert cog pad and viola. The rest all sit against the weapon or the power cables. I say its all worth the work in the long run.
Cheers,
Xi
