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I've recently been working on some older metal kits for my Space Marine chapter, the Eternity Wardens, here being inspected by a Techmarine before final insignia are added and the vehicles certified for service.



Out of the three of them, the metal Dreadnought is easily my favorite. The thing weighs an absolute ton, but looks as good as it ever did.



The Rogue Trader landspeeder, on the other hand, is a horrible nightmare of a kit to build. The details are soft, the parts fit and breakdown notoriously sloppy, and being a skimmer, basing it is also an issue. You can really tell it was sculpted by hand and cast in a fairly low-tech process. I've now built two of these, and hope to never do another one.



This Whirlwind suffered a bit of damage at my hands during the pre-painting disassembly and cleanup. I actually broke the V-shaped piece that holds the missle racks together, so I had to fabricate a new solution for the missiles, ensuring they're level and square, while handling the not inconsiderable weight of the metal pieces. The final assembly has several 2mm metal pins inside holding everything together.

It also amuses me that the exhaust stacks on the Rhino chassis, which are notorious for breaking on these old kits, had already been painstakingly replaced by thick brass wire by a previous owner. It's nice that I was able to retain some of the original owner's work even after I'd repainted and rebuilt everything else.

Nice!

The hand rails on the rhinos are one of the things you only see in pictures. I never bothered to put them on mine, and I doubt many have survived the decades.

I never had the RT speeder, but do have the next one that was also in metal, and a beast to work with.

The old metal dread holds up incredably well for it’s age. And lets you enforce table-side justice as a dreadsock if needed.

Crayon launcher FTW!

Those look great! I have two metal dreds in pieces still, but I let my old speeder go at some point and sold off all my Mark I Rhinos. I've got a few classic metal Marines still in a box somewhere... maybe someday I'll have a go at a classic chapter!

 Nevelon wrote:

I never had the RT speeder, but do have the next one that was also in metal, and a beast to work with.

The old metal dread holds up incredably well for it’s age. And lets you enforce table-side justice as a dreadsock if needed.

The 2nd edition land speeder is the next model on my to-buy list. I expect it will go better than the lawn chair, since by the 90s GW had improved their large miniatures sculpting at least slightly. In general I don't really mind working with metal miniatures, especially now that I have a dremel tool with the useful sanding, grinding and cutting accessories for it to make things easier.

The old boxnaught doesn't get the respect it deserves for being a bit of a blank canvas for options and conversions. You had four different sarcophagus plates with chapter specific heraldry, three different right arm weapons (twin lascannon, multi-melta and assault cannon), two left arms (powerfish, missile launcher, plus a space wolf specific lightning claw arm for Bjorn). For gamers with access to the GW UK mail order catalog, it was as good as it got back then. You can also get a bit of life to the mini with reposing the waist and shoulder joints (and even more if you want to do some slight sculpting of the joints to flex them a bit. I'd love to build a few more of these ones, especially if I can score some of the now-OOP Forgeworld weapon arms.