Say Hello to my Fellblade.

About a year and a half ago while reading BoLS I saw a post showing a Space Marine Superheavy built from the GW Baneblade Kit.  While it looked cool, I didn’t really pay it much mind because I wasn’t sure when the next Hogs Apoc game was going to be.  Fast forward to the middle of January when Jester started planning the Siege of Pheridan Secundas.

After it was mentioned that he wanted to get a Apoc game together, I wanted to build something special for the big game. At first I was looking at scratch building a Thunderhawk Gunship, but I wasn’t sure if I could build it out in the couple of months till the game.  That project had to take a back seat for this game.   While looking for something else I could easily scratch build or convert I was reading the forums at Apocalpyse40k.com,  I found a thread named Fellblades of Renown – The Ancient Super Heavies of the Space Marines. The first image on the page when I entered the thread was the big red beast I had seen before.

The Sanctimonia of Cruor, the Purity of the Blood.

Loken had posted pics and a links to the BoLS article, forums post by Machinator, and Machinator’s ebay store for his conversion bits.  Machinator has since been posting on the thread, showing what he has been working on.  Reading though the full thread I was impressed with Machinators modeling, and other fellblades he had created.  I checked out his ebay store and saw that he had released a complete conversion kit to do the Sanctimonia Cruoris conversion.

A couple of weeks later, I committed myself to building a Fellblade.  I had Big_D order a GW Baneblade kit, and I ordered the conversion kit from Machinator’s store. Once all the parts came in, I sat down and started planing what was needed by looking at all the parts.

The first thing that stood out to me was that I needed to cut the turret mounting ring out of the main body piece of the baneblade kit. Being a hobby novice when it comes to converting / kit bashing I sat down with my hobby knife and started tracing the indention between the part I wanted to keep and the part I didn’t. Four hours later and 3 major gouges in the hull later I was done. When I mated the new turret plate to the hull however I quickly noticed that the cut hole was till too small for the new plate. So I broke out the old rotary tool with a cutting disk and ground down the last little bit to get the pieces to fit. While I had the rotary tool out I took a few seconds to also cut out the baneblade engine plates Adeptus Mechanicus shrine. After I was done cutting I broke out the sanding wheel and smoothed out the pieces.

With all the parts cut and all the resin cleaned I started putting the model together. If you’ve ever put one of these kits together before, it’s pretty much the same. I was glad I had hit Harbor Freight a few days before and picked up a couple of pressure clamps. Everything was going ok until I got to the treads. If I had any gripe about the entire build it was the treads. Being custom treads, I was expecting these to just build themselves (or at least fit together correctly) After doing 1/2 of the right tread wrong I started just cutting the custom treads to fit. The left tread I got looking better but I still felt it was a little more work than it probably should have been. I also ended up with about 15 extra single treads. I kinda wished that they had shipped 4 extra of the large treads instead of the singles.

The rest of the build went smoothly and I was happy with the results. I even took some time and decked it out with the iconography of the Blood Angels. Now that the main build is done I just need to cut the barrels of the vulcan mega-bolters and then give the model a coat of paint.

Overall I think Machinator’s conversion kit is a great kit. It changes the way that one of the more iconic SHs in the game looks and is armed. As mentioned, my only real complaint with the kit was the fact that your expected to cover the long bottom of the tread lines with 1 long piece and a few medium and small pieces, which seemed a little counter intuitive. But even with that in mind, I wouldn’t mind building another one of these kits.

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