gobert wrote:Glad to hear the butt nurgling is inbound! Will let you off for slowing down if the tigers are getting reinforcements. Good luck with the defiler
Thanks for your comment and for bearing with me!
Update below!
Zambro wrote:Great to see your minis - they look amazing. Looking forward to seeing what you do with the defiler!
Thank you so much, glad you like 'em!
Alright, 'ere we go again! I'm sorry for not posting in a while. I was busy working on the Defiler and huffing copious amounts of glue in the process
I feel a bit light-headed now, but at least the mini is mostly done regarding the assembly. Let me show you where we're at right now:
As you can see, I mostly finished building the entire Defiler, and I gotta say, it was quite a blast to put together for the most part. Though I do have to admit that, having recently built a new Deimos Predator from the 30k range, a model that is much newer, I did most definitely notice a difference in the quality of the cast. The parts fit much more snugly and were packed a lot tighter on the sprue of the Predator. Still. I certainly had fun building my Defiler either way. I tried to model it with a dynamic pose (as I am want to do) by making it look like it was mid swipe with it's gigantic crab claw.
As you can see, I already added a mockup of a Daemon head. I have decided I will not be using the heads that come with the kit, but instead sculpt one from scratch that better fits the scale and the theme. The keen eyed among you will probably already have correctly assumed that this head wil have the classic Nurgle 'unicorn' horn, and will resemble an oversized Plaguebearer in design.
Please ignore all the horrible mold lines for now, they will be removed before the painting stage, I promise!
Above is a closeup of the connecting piece that links the torso to the leg section. This part originally had a lot of silly gubbins on it, such as hydraulic pistons that went nowhere, I decided to get rid of these and instead work with what is already seen on the model. I added a pair of cut down wooden toothpicks to represent the hydraulic piston going down and attaching to the chassis below. I also added some additional detail like the meathooks and the nurgle symbol in the ... well... groin area, I guess?
Here's the torso/turret of the Defiler without any attachments. In this image, you can see that I uded bunched up paper towels to stuff out the interior, then set it in place using superglue. This is certainly where a lot of the glue huffing took place. I should take better care when working with super glue. Now, I mostly wear my gas mask for such tasks to avoid inhaling the fumes.
I use this mix of paper towels and super glue because it gives me a super solid base for my sculpting. It dries very quickly (as the superglue would) and becomes very hard, making it easy to block out a large shape like the head without requiring me to waste a ridiculous amount of expensive greenstuff on that.
The large battlecannon in the center is still moveable:
I will see if I can keep it that way. It will depend on the sculpting I do on the rest of the torso, and whether that would look weird. I nthese pics, you can already see some of the weapon options on the Defiler as well.
The twin-linked Reaper Autocannon. One of the first things I did was remove the bayonets on the barrels. Bayonets on a vehicle are simply ridiculous, but apparently
GW someheow thought they were awesome in that era
Also, is it just me or is that autocannon really skinny? seems more akin to today's Stubbers, if you ask me. Anyway, I really like the look of them with the drilled out barrels. Once again, I used my patented
X-acto drilling technique to achieve these results.
With all that talk about weapon options, let's not forget about the chaos icon that's meant to go on the Defiler's back. Since this is a pretty fiddly bit, I decided to also magnetize it, lest I break it off in one of my inevitable, clumsy moments.
Above, you can see the magnet in the back of the Defiler's torso. And here's the icon, attached to the model via the magic of MAGNETS:
Not impressed? Alright, alright... let's look at some more weapon options. I heard Lascannons on Defiler's are supposed to be good now, so I decided to make a conversion for that option since it's not in the base kit:
Above, you can also see the Havoc launcher on the other side of the vehicle. I'm currently in the process of magnetizing all these weapon options. Progress is unfortunately rather slow as I am currently a bit busy with work. Hope you will forgive me
The
TL lascannon was mounted on a 25mm base, as that is almost the exact same diameter as the turret ring on the Autocannons. I attached some gargoyle heads to the muzzles to add that bit of chaosy goodness. Of course, all the loyalist incriptions on the
LC will be sculpted over with yucky Nurgle stuff, and will bulk out the joint with pipes, hydraulics, fleshy bits etc. Next, there's a closeup shot of the Havoc Launcher:
I added one of the armor plates (from the power scourge) here instead of where it was supposed to go. I think it works better here.
And the heavy flamer.
FWIW, I also kept this one poseable for now. Will have to see if this complicates painting or not.
Finally, here's some (pretty terrible) pics of my custom built power scourge. I decided to make my own because I really don't like the glorified egg whisk that comes in the kit as standard.
Now I know this doesn't really look like much of anything right now. However, since taking this picture, I've significantly improved on that initial concept. Stay tuned to see how that turns out!
Next, here's some more pics with the other armaments:
This is one of the best angles
IMHO. "POV: You're boutta get squished
"
Last but not least: I decided to leave the left claw poseable for now, as that allows me to take fun, goofy pics like this one:
Remember, these are definitely NOT toys, and you are absolutely not supposed to mimic the sound effects with your mouth as you do this.
Aaaand that's all I have for now. I hope you enjoyed, and that you stay tuned for further updates. As usual, I want to thank everyone who checked this out, and especially all of you AWESOME people who took the time to vote and/or comment here. It's really motivating to know people are following along with my progress and enjoying what I make. Thank you so, so much for that, and see you soon!
