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I've just recently started to include a small unit of stormtroopers again in my army. The problem, though, is that I made them back in 4th ed, when their best use was melticide. Not to say that that's useless, but what my list needs is stormies who can show up and deliver plasma.

But what if, in the future, I change my mind yet again? Ideally, I'd just make a new pair of stormies from scratch holding plasma guns and then I'd just switch models, but right now I don't have the time, patience, or, more importantly, resources to do this.

As such, I decided that what I would do is to convert my stormies up so that they're holding onto the frame of a weapon. I could then make a part that plugs in to make it look like a plasma gun. Then, if I decided I wanted melta again, I could just make a new melta plug-in, and, well, plug it in.

The first thing I did was to start with my stormtrooper in melta mode:



... and chop off the meltagun. I left the handle, strap, and back of the gun.

After much deliberation about how I was going to make the parts snap into place, I had my plan. I wanted to use a necron glow rod like I did for my other plasma guns:



So I started by putting down a piece of plasticard that was just low enough to fit a glow rod. Then I bulked up the attachment with a side panel that connected it back to the gun, another side panel up front, a piece of plasticard to connect the front of the strap to the handle, and a little piece of plasticard to connect the handle to the front side panel.



Basically, I made a cage, except one side (the side facing the stormie) was left open. I would then plug my plasma gun bit in from the side.

Once this was done, I cut down my glow rod and stuck it in. I put down two pieces of plasticard down on the side, so that it would lock into the cage.

Then I gussied it up with some GS, filling in the bottom and wrapping it so it was flush with the inner piece of plasticard, and starting the plasma head. Obviously, I had to be really careful here. The head was connected to the glow rod, but I had to make sure the GS didn't touch the cage, or else it wouldn't detatch later. Same for all the rest of the GS work.



At this point, I struggled to figure out how to make this look more like a plasma gun. I considered some hosing, some more heat sinking, etc. I'm a terrible weapon designer, though, so I just decided to keep it simple.

After removing the plug in (with a little help from my hobby knife), I cleaned everything up and put it back in. Honestly, at this point I was kind of surprised that this cockamamie idea even worked.

The next phase of GS saw me putting on a purity seal on the unsightly rear of the gun, while I put more GS on the plug-in to make it look nice with the cage.



Then all that was left was to take out, clean, and put the plug in back in and then add the front nozzle for the barrel.





Then came the painting, which was obviously the easy part



I'm not 100% satisfied with the way they turned out, but it's not too shabby for a crazy engineering plan and a single afternoon/evening of work. Plus, they're obviously plasma guns.

Now it's just time to kill some termies!

That is kind of an incredible conversion. I love the idea of making little cages to slide in the plasma, and I love the idea of using necron glow rods for the gun. Props to you, sir.

Insanely time consuming, and much more easily achieved with other techniques. I LOVE IT!!!!!

Well, I couldn't find anything else about weapon swapping that would work in this situation. It was all either pinning with dreadnought arms and the like, or using magnets. The former set never yielded something that would work, and the latter I didn't have any of, and needed them to be done by today.

Ends justify the awkward means in this case

Heh. That looks rather neat. I would have just cut the cylindrical end off the Melta and attached a couple of metal rods to mate up with some holes in the body of the weapon. Whomp up a couple of plasma ends as well and you could interchange to your hearts content (you could also switch to magnets later if you wanted).

however your way looks a lot better

I love it. I have always hated the whole magnet thing. Though I have never tried to do them, even the thought of an attempt makes me cringe. This is a very novel approach and with some more time and some tweaking could prove very workable.

Thats a sweet idea, i like !

Still wanting to swap gear but not as much effort as this?? Well if the arms come off of your mini then try half pinning, glue one end into the torso and just have a hole in the other. then just slide parts off at will. Could be a useful alternative.