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Hi, I have the minimal of hobby tools, I have a hobby knife and sprue cutters. If I need to remove something like a small skull or whatever from armor I use the sprue cutters then clean it up with the hobby knife. My question is, is this viable for getting rid of the dark angels logo off the plain marines from the dark vengeance set? I'm painting up a few marines as presents for Xmas and figured it would be cheap to use DV.

You'd better be really good with an Xacto knife. Those DA icons are very thick and the shoulder pads are very curved.

Good luck.

That was what I was worried about, usually the pieces I snip off aren't as curved. Well I could try to get some aobr marines instead.

If you add sandpaper to that list you can pretty much do what your trying to achieve. Although i do recommend getting some diamond files

Thanks, I actually do have a bunch of sandpaper for work, I've never used any on anything besides fiberglass and aluminum though so this might get exciting.

get a pretty fine one so you wont leave any marks

If you find the pads arent as smooth as you would like, get some watered down liquid green stuff and slather it over the effected areas,
Like a wash, it'll flow into the recesses even out the surface

You can certainly do it, you just need to take your time and be careful, You'll see on the model on the left here that the bottom still looks a bit odd, it's because I'm currently getting a finer file so I can fix it up.

The biggest problem is that the bottom of the sword extends onto the pad rim, it's the hardest bit to clean up.

Alternatively if you have spare pads, you can just hack them right back and totally replace them like I've done on the sergeant, although be warned that some of the pads because they are moulded as a single piece with the body are slightly different shapes to normal SM pads.

Thanks, I completely forgot about the tip of the sword. This would be my first at real conversion work and since its going to be a gift I might just buy non dark angels. Ill try on one and if I fail horribly ill buy regular marines.

I don't know how good your sculpting skills are but i converted my DV marines into normal marines with knife, file and snadpaper like the other posters suggested and sculted a simple chapter marking on top of the old dark angel ones.

Doing this you can hide the areas where you made a mistake.

I for myself would always go this harder way because the DV marines come with more varied poses than the AoBR ones.

I did it with this: http://www.games-workshop.com/gws/catalog/productDetail.jsp?catId=cat470006a&prodId=prod1380022a
Just use a knife for the biggest part, and scrape the rest of with the clean up tool. Works like a charm!

i dont think saving a few bucks is worth hours of frustration.

unless you really really like those models and want to convert them then i guess it makes sense