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Alright folks,
I am looking at SM or CSM for my 40k army, my question is fairly simple. How difficult is it to convert SM minis into CSM minis? Are there differences in scale? Is it a fairly simple process? Am I out of my mind? I am just trying to find a way to save some money so I don't have to buy a whole lot of new minis. Would AoBR SM be easy to convert to chaos?

Sorry... a lot of questions I know, but I am just wanting to know.

Thanks!

Redbeardthefarmer

If your Aobr marines aren't already assembled it would be fairly simple to convert them by shaving off the imperial eagles and adding chaos marine bits. I would advise buying at least one chaos marine squad so you can use some bits from it to convert your normal marines.

Standard SM require no conversion at all in order for you to use them as CSM. It all depends on the background of the chapter. They may have only recently turned to chaos.

If you do want to convert them think spikes and skulls, since tha's all GW do.

Chaos and Imperial Marines are the same size, so you won't have scaling issues.

Chaos have noticeably different back packs though, plus all the extra 'gubbins' really sets them apart.

As 'smeezilla' suggested, buying a box of Chaos Marines and mixing the bits up may work, in conjunction with shaving off the imperial insignia.

With plenty of green stuff you could fashion some nurgle infested marines?

Scale is the least of your problems - all marines are the same size, spiky or not. However, scale is pretty much the only thing that is the same with regular SM and Chaos Marines. All you need to do is study the pictures and you should figure out that all the details are different. Chaos power armour and weapons have chaotic iconography and the helmets and power packs are quite a bit different.

To convert normal Space Marines into Chaos Space Marines, you would need to adjust the whole power armour (including helmets, shoulder pads and power pack) and weapons. That means changing pretty much everything. In theory, it is possible if you had mad skills. But if you had such skills, you wouldn't be asking this question to begin with. Also, it would take too much time to be worth the effort (or possible savings).

It depends which army your going for, Iron warriors are pretty easy, just file down iconography, convert them to have some armoured plating to cover the obviously space marine bits, for nurgle, just cover with greenstuff and for slaanesh make fur trims, tentacles and leather bands. Khorne is harder, that's going to be mostly just voilent things, maybe gouge the armour with a knife or put blood splatters on them.

If your just going for generic chaos, then I would say filing down the chest plates/any other iconography and then making them spikier would work, the best thing to do after that is to buy a squad of chaos marines and then mix the two squads together. For the converted marines to have the normal SM backpacks is understandable, they could have recently converted to chaos.

If you wanted to take the recently converted to chaos idea further, you could gouge marks across the chest's of the models to represent them just obliterating the marks on their chests and not having had time to properly get rid of them. Another thing you could do (painting wise) is to paint their chapter symbol on a shoulder pad, then a red cross or once again, gouge a cross.

Hope this helps ^^

Just scrape/slice off all the imperial eagles. These tend to appear on the chest armour, the sides of the bolters and in the case of the captain, I believe his collar is and eagle and the front of the dreadnought also has one.

Ask your mum or sister if they have any old bracelet or necklace chains they don't want and chop them up to hang around your marines.