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So I finally got around to converting up a rifleman dread using the Aegis defense line kit I bought 6 months ago and I thought I'd share. A lot of my delay was in not knowing exactly how to set it up. This thread was helpful in showing some options, but I didn't want to just tack the aegis guns straight onto the dread. As luck would have it, I got a ridiculous deal on some used minis and among the bitz was an AoBR melta dread right arm and a regular dread CCW left arm. I decided to use these as my start point.

First up I have the aegis defense line guns before cutting them up. These are so cheap and come with some nice terrain too.


They are a bit hard to see in this pic, but the green blobs are the right and left junk dreadnought arms I found (they already had some paint on them, but I'll just paint over them). I started by sawing off the barrels, though in retrospect, the better method is to but off the entire bottom gun assembly and then take just the barrel of the top gun.


For the left arm (CCW) I sawed off the army about 2mm below the mounting hole on the arm (standard dread CCW arm, not AoBR). This leaves enough room to mount one of the barrels on the front of the arm and to fit the entire lower barrel assembly into the space I just cut off


Here is how the bottom barrel assembly fits onto the bottom of the CCW arm.


I wanted to keep the ammo canisters from the aegis line, so I cut out a slot in the side of the arm (aligned to the slot in the bottom aegis gun) in which to put the ammo. However, I didn't want the bottom autocannon to be as far out to the outside of the arm, so I filled in the aegis slot with card. (If I did it again, I would fill it with card, but use the right gun for the left arm and vice versa so that the card would be on the inside.


Here is the completed left arm!


I then repeated the process for the right arm


Finally, I put some rare earth magnets in the arms and mounted them on my dread!


Front shot! Yes, I realize there is a bit of space there. If I were building the dread from scratch i would have mounted the magnet on the inside. This dread came used, so I glued the magnet to the outside of the arm mounts (where the pegs used to be). I may try to dress it up with some green stuff or wire or something. But it works well enough for now! Actually, another option I could have considered would be to recess the magnet holes in the army futher so that I would essentially have a magnetic peg. Ah well, perhaps if I do it again.


An there you have it! I hope this post was helpful!

Looks good! It might not be too late to recess those magnets.

Sadly, I was in a hurry to get this guy ready for a tournament at PAX this weekend, so I glued the various magnets. What I might do later is try to recess the main dread-side magnets. We'll see. I have about 4 more dreads to make so I'll decide on a common system.

Also, should this thread maybe go in tutorials instead? That just occurred to me.

Seriously, those autocannon arms are great! I've seen lots of attempts which turn out looking like somebody sticky taped a duck's bum to their dread. These are awesome though. Well done!!

As above, I would recess the magnets though .. that way it'd look 100% awesomeness.

Oh, that's really good. On mine I just stuck the aegis weapon mounts right on the dread... but yours is so much better. Gives me all kinds of ideas! Excellent work!

Well done. As stated above, most conversions using these bits don't look as integrated into the dreadnought arms as yours do.

If you find a way to recess the magnets after the tournament, the dread will look tight.

it should be a simple matter to drill out and recess the torso magnets, considering all the work you put into making this look so good, you owe it to the project to do so.

Doing so would make this a definite A+ conversion.

Looks great man. On the magnets, just carve out the hole in the dread arm a bit with a modeling scalpel and roll a thin "sausage" of GS going a bit heavy on the yellow in the mix. push the magnet into this and let it cure overnight. Then remove the magnet and glue it in with gap sealing superglue.

Easypeasy.


On a side note, the first thing I thought upon seeing the assembled pics was "40k Battletech"...which isn't bad.

This is the best autocannon conversion I've seen yet. Lots of people use the Aegis guns and just tack them on like you said, but they never looked like dreadnought arms to me. I've done something similar with Leman Russ executioner autocannons but yours looks better in my opinion

that dread looks seriously mean.

Just out of curiosity. how did it fare at the tourny?I sense a gap in the market!

Thank you for all the kind words, guys! It was my first tourney and I went 1-2. If I'm feeling ambitious tomorrow I'll write up a battle report tomorrow. But overall the dread did some nice shooting. In game two he popped two landspeeders. :-)

Alright, with the tournament through, I took the time to properly recess the magnets. I started trying to drill out the arms, but instead I realized I could do some arthroscopic surgery and go in through the front plate. I cut off the front and put the magnets inside. This turned out to be a very tedious process because magnets + metal tools + small fiddly places = a huge pain in the ass! Eventually I got the left side glued only to have the magnet from the right side pop off and stick to the left magnet! So I had to cut the left arm open and use green stuff.

Lesson: attach magnets before putting the torso together (not an option in this case since I got the dread used, but I'll remember for the future).

Here are the finished arms. Right:


And left (note where I had to cut it out of the arm):


And the finished dread!

Massive well done! Also massive SSSSH!! don't make it easy for people to make these evil little killboxes!

I'll have to do this 6 times. Thrice with Ven Dread kits. (Grey Knights)

Now it is perfect.

Sweet looking Rifleman Dread.