Celestial Lions Land Speeder (Part 6 -Finished!)

And here we are:

Finished!

Yes, I finished this thing -finally! Here are the final steps leading up to the finish. This next pic shows the addition of the middle stabilizing strut thingy that hangs down from the Land Speeder's hill. The trick here is to eye-ball it just right to get it as centered as possible.

Centering of the stabilizing thing.

Next was the time comsuming and agonzing hand painting of the Celestial Lions icons. I think the ones on the marine pauldrons turned out alright but the ones on the Speeder are just OK. And OK enough to not feel the desire to redo them.

Icons done. 

Next came the addition of the ball-joint mount.  Unlike a previous Land Speeder I remembered to lube the ball joint with some petroleum jelly so that it moves better and removes easier. If the ball breaks off inside the mount it is a real pain in the ass getting it back out!

Mount and ball joint flight stand.

And it's done! Woo-hoo! A Land Speeder Tornado with all the weapon options fully magnetized!

Multi-melta and Heavy Flamer

Heavy Bolter and Heavy Flamer

Heavy Bolter with Assault Cannon.

Multi-Melta and Multi-melta. For extra meltiness!

All-in-all it was a fun project and despite the span of a year I am really very satisfied with how it turned out. Now I just need to get The Bob or some other volunteer to blow it up on the first turn of a Kill Team game!

Celestial Lions Land Speeder (Part 5)

So close to done it hurts.

Continuing on from Part-4, I focused on trying to make the gunner(s) magnetic. It was an excercise in tenacity but I managed to persevere. It took a lot of cutting, scrapping and fiddling to get it to a point where I was happy with them both.The joins are concealed fairly well and I will be able to take full advantage of the slide-bar if I choose too.

Magnetic torsos.

The gunner's arms were assembled by glueing them to the torso and quickly mounting the gun to the stabilizing rod and them glueing it to the grip in the shooter's hands. I did this with both sets of torsos allowing about 10 hours of curing time for each gunner torso. 

Heavy Bolter torso.

Both of the gunners magnetic option have turned out as I had hoped they would. Yay for the little victories! Now to get their iconography done.

Both the gunners together with their guns. 

Which leads to my next conundrum: the icons. Da Masta Cheef kindly suggested a seller on ebay who makes and sells many different and diverse iconography options in water tranfers. In particular spotted these Lion transfers he thought would work well for my needs, although in truth ge probably was just sick of me bitchibg about hand painting the Celestial Lions icons.

Lion icons.

However, although I like them, they just didn't work for my needs. And they were just too different in style from the ones I have been hand painting. So I will have to continue to hand paint the icons, and I am OK with that. There is a crude aspect about it that I like, that gives each marine a bit of their own character.

Compare and contrast.

Here is the Multimelta Gunner mounted into position after I attached his head. I have always thought tbis gun was a weird choice due to how big and LOS restricting it is. It must be difficult to aim at close ground targets unless the pilot angles and positions the Land Speeder just right.

Muti-melta gunner in position.

I added the driver's shield and the two steps as well. The steps needs a bit more paint though and they are bit too rusty at the moment. .

Driver's shield added.

Only a few touch-ups left (not much more) and of course the chapter icons need to be done which are going to be challenging as always. Watch out the next part to see how that turns out.

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Come join our Facebook group: Neverness Hobbies. It is fun. Really.

Celestial Lions Land Speeder (Part 4)

Work has continued on this light vehicle. Here is the latest progress:

The "edging" highlights are now done, and the antenna-thing and the spoiler have been added on.

Coming together...

Additional attention has been given to the underside guns. I am pleased with how they are turning out.

Painted guns.

I focused quite a bit on making the Multimelta and the Heavy Flamer appear dirty and sooty from all the flamable goodness that they spew forth.

Dirty and sooty.

The pilot was finally glued into position and now this thing is really beginning to feel closer to done. The pilot's body is a torso from one of the Horus Heresy boxed games. The other two torsos will be used for the gunners.

"Pilot to ground control, are we ready for cockpit check?"

This is moving along in spite of my limited free time to work on it. Next up, and this may be tricky, or it may just be challenging, but I am going magnetize the torso of the gunner so I can switch out the gun. I figured it would be better to replace the whole guy than just the gun. We'll see just how crazy this will make me next time.

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Ok, a bit of blog news. I have created a Facebook Group called Neverness Hobbies. It's intended to be a supplemental place to support this blog on social media. I hope for it to be a place were we can discuss stuff related to this hobby and other things that I just don't feel fit this blog format. I have no intent to change how I do this blog, so don't worry, I am not moving this to FB or anything like that. It's, as I said, supplemental.

So you are welcome to join us on Facebook if you wish, just search for Neverness Hobbies. As always, look for the Red Squig. (Edit: Or click this link)

Look for the Red Squig. 

Celestial Lions Land Speeder (Part 3)

Continuing on from Part-2, progress has continued on this thing. Despite some concerns from commenters regarding glueing the rubberbands to the the vehicle's hull, there was no such problem. However I did discover that I had left the dashboard out (oops), but that was fixed easily enough.

The hull is assembled.

Next up I attached the rear jets. Then I added the grav plate bumper thing that goes along the sides. And finally I glued on the doors. The original instructions suggest a way to build this thing so that those compartment doors can open, but the pegs broke off both of them when I attempted this. Not seeing any benefit in that feature anyway, I figured "screw it" and just glued the doors shut. Following that, I painted a Shining Gold highlight along all the edges.

More stuff added.

As I have shown in some other posts, I like using my pin-vice to paint heads. I feel I that do a better job painting heads this way.

Head painting the fun way.

I then applied decals to the crew's left knee pads and one of the paldrons. The Assault Icon on the paldron will be repainted to match the style on the Tactical Squad I painted for Kill Team. The Chapter Icon is going to be handled differently this time, but more on that in a future post.

Decals applied.

While looking at painted examples in some of the recent Codex Space Marine publications I was inspired by the examples showing them armed with Assault Cannons. I had a Ravenwing accessory sprue handy which just happened to have one (two, actually) on it. So I built that and added a magnet to the mounting bracket. Checkout Part One to see more on how I made this thing magnetic.

Now with Assault Cannon option.

In the background of the above pic you can see a few more bits. Most of them are going to make a 2nd gunner torso. I am making that so that I can also switch out the guns in that position as well. More of that in Part 4. See you then!

Celestial Lions Land Speeder (Part 2)

After many months of neglect, time was ripe to turn my attention back to the Celestial Lions Land Speeder. I must confess that I sorta forgot about this model. But when looking through my 2017 posts for my year end review, this caught my attention again. And my imagination, as I still think this would be a fun thing to include in my Kill Team games.

After assembly, of course.

After far too much contemplation regarding the undercarriage gravplates, I chose to just make them a darker metallic color. The gold kind of shines through creating this weird tonal effect that I like.

The grav plates.

I worked on the interior next, if you can call the crew compartment of an open topped vehicle like this an "interior". I made the buttons and switches an assortment of colors, as the rules of old school sci-fi dictates. I used Dark Reaper on the seats, which amused me a bit because it reminded me of the seats in a car I used to own. Granted my car didn't have docking ports for power armor, but then the idea of Space Marines chill'n in a comfortable ride makes me grin. After all, there is no way they could actually feel that comfort through that power armor, right?

They don't recline, but they are heated.

Satisfied with things at this stage I turned my attention to the rear jet exhausts section of the speeder. I painted it in a few tones of metallic using Bolt Gun metal and Nuln Oil.

Ready to assemble the hull. 

Everything regarding the main body of this thing was ready to be assembled. You may have heard the tales of woe regarding this original Land Speeder's challenging assembly. Really, you just need Plastic Cement, patience, and lots of rubber bands.

No such thing as too many rubber bands.

And this is where we leave off for now, with this model banded up and the glue curing.

Celestial Lions Land Speeder (Part 1)

As an option for my Celestial Lions Kill Team I wanted a Land Speeder in lieu of having just a Tactical Squad. I knew before I began that I wanted to magnetize this vehicle for gun options. I also knew that I didn't want to use the Typhoon launchers as that's the most expensive (in-game) option. This piece would be interchangeable between a standard Land Speeder and a Land Speeder Tornado.

This was actually the prime motivation behind this whole Celestial Lions project and it was the first thing I started on. Back in December, I primed the whole kit while it was still attached to it's frames using Krylon Gold.

Primed sprues.

After just over a month I returned to this model confident that I had a renewed grasp on the Celestial Lions paint scheme. Now this is the original model that came in the 40k 3rd ed starter box.  It is somewhat notorious for being a model that doesn't like to go together without a fight. Having built one of these before, I know that it takes patience, skill, rubberbands and plenty of plastic cement.

Stage one, with magent hole.

At this point I figured out where I wanted the hull mounted magnet to go. I simply eye-balled it and carved out a hole using my X-acto blade. I made the hole big enough for the smaller magnets, that will be on the guns, to fit through where they'll contact the larger magnet superglued within.

Large magnet superglued over small hole.

On to the painting, where I picked out all the areas that needed a black basecoat. Next, I applied Chestnut Ink to all the grooves and recesses on the main hull and the lower assembly.

Test fit. 

Next I had to decide which weapons to use for my load out options. I chose the multimelta from the 2nd edtion era Land Speeder and the heavy flamer from the Space Marine Attack Bike which is also from that time.

Old enough to be relics.

The magnets I am using are seriously strong and in the event that the superglue were ever to fail I would likely not be able fix it again due to the way this kit goes together. So I decided to glue a piece of sprue over and around the magnet for extra security.

Sprue cage over the manget.

With the sprue cage set and the magnets glued, I am happy to show that this appears like it will work perfectly!

Heavy Flamer option.

Multimelta option.

I have another weapon (or two...maybe. the debate continues) that I would like to add to these options, but for now I feel like we can move on with the painting and assembly. And since this post is now long enough, we shall leave those steps for part 2!

Saturday Night Waaagh!

So took the ol' Battle Barge to Planet Hobbytown, in the JC System, where Sven and the Wolves stood valiantly against the combined Waaagh! of Da Long Wayz Dezert Group controlled by the archfiend himself, the Masta Cheef and Waaagh! ...actually I have no idea what he calls his Orks, so for now I'll just call it Waaagh! Murl.

Due to a lack of players (5 of us showed up) I challenged 2k of Space Wolves vs. 1K Each of Orks (the other 2 player had their own game-Space Wolves vs. Necrons). Sounded like a fun challenge. Only I didn't have a 2k list prepped, so I had to modify an older list. Without going all full-blown Battle Report, I will simply discuss the highlights of this challenging and enjoyable game!

The big yellow/orange die is the Turn Counter, this was an Annihilation mission, an after I placed my sniper scouts, da Boyz got the first turn. Here you can see the bulk of Cheef's force which was mostly mechanized completing 1st turn moves with Murl starting on his moves. Yes that is a Forgeworld Grot Megatank! The big tank in the back is a Battlewagon.

My left flank, eyeing Murl's Mob. He took a list I never have tried (I'm always enticed by the Elites, Fast Attack and Heavies to do this): All Boyz Mobz, one Joined by a Warboss, a Nobz Mob with Painboy (Feel No Pain would equal pain for me!). The plan was to pie plate the crap out of the big mobz with my Whirlwind and Vindicator and get my Landspeeder Tornado up there with the Heavy Flamer and do likewise.

Here's my middle ground and some of the right flank. The Epicast Vindicator is eyeing the masses of Murl's Mob, The (truly) Venerable Dreadnought is poised to start popping tanks with his twin-link las cannon. (The rhino has a model on it to help me keep up with what unit is inside of it.)

This next pic shows the rest of the right flank. I believe we're seeing Murl taking his first run moves. Pay particular attention to that far off rhino (stuffed with a full 10-man squad of Grey Hunters) and those two trukks of Da Masta Cheef...

...here my lonely rhino exchanges fire with the trukks, though it escapes me what actually happened...

 Here my Venerable Dreadnought blows the converted Matilda Battlewagon to smithereens, prompting an encouraging response from Cheef (at the moment, he thought I was targeting his precious Grot Megatank! LOL! "No dude, I targeted the Battlewagon!"

And during that 1st turn of mine, Sven Axegrinder shows up in his Drop Pod! (he's the mostly painted guy with no arms! I really should finish that model...hmmm...) The green die on my rhino is to indicate that I had popped smoke.

This is a view looking down the field after the 2nd Ork movement phase... Oh yes, the Rune Priest in the rocks was whittling down the mob that the Murl's Warboss was tied too with both Jaws of the World Wolf and Living Lightning. Those Orks know how to dodge! LOL!

The first two rounds of firing I was able to greatly reduce the Ork numbers... but they were closing fast! Then, disaster struck! The Ork Truckers were able to charge and totally surround the rhino with the marines in it! THey did if in such away that my Grey Hunters were unable to escape the rhino once it was wrecked into a raging firestorm, and, well, they died a blaze of glory!

 The boyz get stuck in! With charges against the Rhino by Murl's Mob, and a charge from a Grot mob and survivors of the mob that was in the Battlewaggon piling into the Wolfguard at the Drop pod. The Sven and the Wolfguard would trimumph and the Ork and Grot units would flee off the board. Meanwhile Murl's mob would immobilize the Rhino, which the Grey Hunters would disembark from (after hearing what happened to the other pack over the com, they weren't about to stay put!)

On my Left flank, the beefy Nob Mob of Murl, smashed through the Blood Claw's rhino! On my turn I shot them, and charged, but the combined toughness of the Nobz and the gifts of the Painboy proved too much for the Blood Claws who were struck down!

In the final throes of the game, you see the Nobz moving to intercept the Runepriest once they had wrecked the Whirlwind. He would take out another nob before they ripped him apart...

In the middle, after taking fire from the boyz in the trukks, the Grey Hunters routed. For the next two rounds the trukk boyz would Sheppard the Grey Hunters right off of the table, who where two close to the foe to not know any fear!

At the top of the blog, you can see the Warboss who engaged the Vindicator in close combat and power clawed it to death! The Venerable Dreadnought dove into close combat with the Warboss, who was down to his last wound, but it was to be as the dread was slowly being dismantled by the Warboss as the game reached it's conclusion...

Here we have Da Masta Cheef's final bombardment of the abandoned bastion in another vain attempt to wipe out the sniper scouts on top of it. Those scouts survived many attacks up there, and although they killed a fair share of orks, they were unable to prevent the green tide from taking the field.

The game went to the Orks!

Orks 10 kps Space Wolves 5 Kps.

Despite blasting a heap of Orks, my inability to eliminate entire units cost me the game, plus getting the Grey Hunters cooked in that Rhino was just a major game changer for me... The Landspeeder managed to survive, it cooked a lot of orks, but once it got their attention and had it's Heavy Flamer ripped off, I moved it very far to make it's KP difficult to grab. Also I grossly overestimated my Terminator's ability to survive and massive ork assault, and should've whittled the unit down more before diving into it like I did. -Whoops! LOL!

Fun game!