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I'm looking to make chaos cultists by giving guns to Skaven plague monks and clan rats for my CSM army (in planning). Now all the best Skaven cultist conversions I have seen use Admech weapons; and for good reason, it looks amazing.
Luckily, I play Admech, so I have plenty of spare radium carbines and galvanic rifles. Unluckily, I play Admech, so I would be very annoyed by seeing the same weapon used by both my fancy skitarii and my cannon fodder rat-men. The fact they represent different weapons would make it all the more maddening.

So now I wonder if there is there some conversion I can do to the Skaven's admech guns to distinguish them from their real skitarii counterparts (eg. cut off the barrel or a bit of green stuff work)?

If not, is there some easy/cheap way to get 20+ lasguns or autoguns? I can find gsc autoguns and shotguns mixed for $1 per gun. I doubt using shotguns for autoguns would be a faux par, but I don't know if I can do better than that. Maybe there are some non-GW bits I can get, such as from another miniatures company or even 3d print it myself? I have a Ultimaker 2 and I've found some .stl files that might work; it's just that I've never been able to print a 28mm weapon, they're so small and I can't get the supports right.

What I tried as a sort of one-off experiment is cutting down a galvanic rifle to be a bit shorter, and replaced the cylindrical clip with a resin box magazine from Anvil Industry.

It looks much more practical.

I'll dig around in my bits box and see if I can find it.

EDIT: found it

Hmm. Was it hard to cut out the normal drum magazine?
Also, does Anvil Industries offer free shipping to the US? The shipping is more than my entire order.

Removing the drum was a little tricky, it's mostly a matter of shaving it down rather than trying to do it in one slice.

I don't know if Anvil does free shipping, I usually just add the mags onto orders I'm already putting in with them. But the idea is there, if there are other bits manufacturers that make magazines you could go with a different design.

Do you know of any that are US based? Anvil and Warlord are in the UK, Vicotoria is in Adelaide; reptilian overlords is the only other one I can think of, but I don't know where they are located. But their FG laser rifles are amazing, I just wish they sold them separately.

How good are your greenstuff skills? Could you add cloth bandages or tacked on plates?

Another avenue might be Grot weapons.

Moderate; I could definitely do bandages, maybe not identifiably metal plates.

Grot weapons are worse than lasguns; too hard to find in bulk, much less buy. If I can't find good 3rd party guns for less than the GSC guns, I'll go with that after I try some 3d printed test prints. The only problem is I'm out of hairspray.

Unless you know a friendly Imperial Guard player willing to let you pillage their leftover sprues, third-party will likely be the most economical route.

You could potentially give oyumaru casting a try. I've had trouble getting good detail with greenstuff or milliput, but I've only made a few attempts.

Here's a demonstration:

https://youtu.be/mVZLXLaidjQ

Recasting 20+ guns? That's too much.