Tabletop Engineer: Making the Blood Angel Terminator

Have to say, this is one of my favourite conversion kit bash jobs. Well done to the Anonymous person who caught the Grey Knight bodies (but next time pop in a name so you can be congratulated!).

Not going to interrupt the Engineer any further in this though. On with the kit bash!

After being hammered (pardon the pun) by a bunch of Thunder Hammer/Storm Shield wielding Terminators I decided I wanted a piece of that pie. I've never been a fan of Terminators, they are an expensive units and with the amount of weapons that can punch through their armour I didn't like having a 200+ point unit that drops like flies sprayed with Raid.

Coming back to the game after a long hiatus from playing and modelling I found they changed the rules for Storm Shields in 5th Edition 40k, still not convinced it took a single game of getting pounded into the ground for me to realise their potential. Dangerous and durable, they make for some excellent assault troops that aren't left with their thumbs up their a****s after a successful assault (changes to sweeping advances also made my Assault Marines cry).

So the answer, build some Terminators. But looked at the new Storm Shields, bah! That's not fitting for a Blood Angel. A brief search of some of the new models and I quickly set my eyes on the Sanguiniary Guard's Wings to use as Storm Shields.

(Courtesy of GW website)

It was a bit of a jump and I had my own doubts whether it would work. The wings were relatively tall and I was concerned it might overshadow the Terminator or just make them look unwieldy. My curiosity (as always) won and I got myself a set of the models to see if my idea could pan out. I think it worked out quite reasonably.

I decided to go the full nine yards and go for a solid block of 10 Terminators. I actually made 5 of them out of Grey Knight Terminators to give one squad a bit more 'flash'. A single box of Sanguinary Guard yielded 10 wings, unfortunately this was split into 5 right handed and 5 left handed wings. This meant I needed some left handed Thunder Hammers, which don't really exist in pre-existing kits. Well, back to bitz hunting.

The answer came in the form of the Chaos Terminator power weapons, with a simple weapon swap I got my left Terminator arm with Thunderhammer. There was some clean up needed to make the Chaos arm a bit more Imperial friendly.

The Terminators themselves were relatively simple to assemble. Unfortunately I had to 'wrist-mount' my Storm Shields, this meant that on close inspect the Storm Shield looks 'glued' to the marine's arm. I know as a converter this little detail should be addressed, a friend even offered to give me a mould for Storm Shield hands to fix it. I reluctantly had to decline, I hate leaving models with tiny detail like this omitted but if I tried to replace all the hands I know I'll never get round to it. The compromise was for the greater good.

Onwards to the painting! For the shields I had an idea that stuck in my head. As the shields were feathers I wanted to go for a flame type effect, mimicking a Phoenix wing. I don't know whether this was a good or bad idea, I'm on the precipice of rejecting and keeping it. The other scheme I had was to paint it blue to signify the energy field around the shield. Since the armour is red anyways I thought a stark blue shield might distinguish the model a bit. I don't know, maybe someone will comment before I glue everything together.

This is the prototype, the others have yet to be finished but at least I know what I'm aiming for. 1 down, 9 to go!

P.S. Since taking the picture of the unfinished Terminator I had decided to swap the orientation of the shield/wing on the arm.

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