"I like it," hissed Lord Eiterfex, above and nearby, "I think it will do nicely."
Cawl didn't dare rise yet.
"I am glad it pleases, my lord."
Eiterfex chuckled, wet and rotten.
"You've done well, Cawl, stop panicking. Grandfather will be pleased."
Cawl straightened up slowly, cautiously. He was careful not to look directly at Eiterfex. He still had waking nightmares from the last time. Instead, he looked down into the valley. The great horror of flesh and rust was weaving webs of steely thread around the yowling victims.
"I'll start building the rest," he said eventually.
Quick aside about the Defiler model. I love that model. Nostalgia has warped my perception, no doubt. I remember the first time I saw it. It was June 2003, a few days after the last exam of my first year at University. I was sitting on Sibly Hall's field with friends, lounging in the afternoon light. I'd purchased a White Dwarf earlier and I opened it to have a flip as we sat there. And that's when I saw the Defiler for the first time. I'd been in the hobby eight years, and I couldn't believe what I was saying. Remember, before this, a dreadnought was a massive centerpiece model for a 40k army. And here I was, faced with a massive metal spider-crab o' death. I look back on it as the beginning of the truly amazing models: the Mumak, the plastic Giant, the High Elves dragon, the Imperial Knight. Okay, they've sometimes gone too far (the clumsily overstated Archaon model springs to mind), but generally GW has wowed us with kits we always thought were impossible until we saw them. And it started with the Defiler.
So when I say I didn't want to use the model for my Death Guard, it's not because I dislike the model. It's because, as ever, I had an idea that wouldn't go away. And trust me when I say, this conversion was even more complex than the Rust Hound. So, I think I'd better break it down into different bits. If nothing else so that I can remember what I did.
Legs
I'm starting with these because they were comparatively easy. I removed the legs from a spare Adeptus Mechanicus Dunecrawler and then cut the foot off of each. I then got four of the long forelegs from the Arachnarok (I had a spare I'd picked up cheap for bits). Now, I had to cut the leg and the claw so that they roughly aligned. Then I used pins and superglue to quickly get a bond between the parts - they components really weren't designed to be together! I then used plastic glue to ensure the bond was solid and left all four legs to totally harden. Then I did some gap filling to make the join look smoother (well, in Nurgle terms).
Body and head
Urg, this was a struggle! I saw the Arachnarok's head off at the neck (and it has a bloody thick neck). Next, I assembled the body halves and face plate of a Bloat Drone. Then I sawed it in half, removing most of the tail so that the back was flattish. After a bit of lining up, I pinned and glued the head to the bod. I left it well enough alone for a while. Then I used tissue, PVA and green stuff to build up a neck so that the join didn't look comical. At the same time, I decided that it needed a mouth, so I inverted the Arachnarok's jaws and glued them onto the bottom of the drone's body, along with the two big mandibles. I had to use the above method to build some flesh up around them, but it didn't take too long. I finished the head by pinning three Maulerfiend tentacles beneath his jaws. The image I had in mind was similar to the scene in the 2005 War of the Worlds movie when Tom Cruise is trapped in the ruined house and sees the fighting machines doing some weird and gribbly thing with their long tendrils outside.
The cannon
So, this bit was actually a lot easier than I was worried about. The limb it's raised on is a Rot Fly's body from the Plague Drones kit. Attaching the cannon from the Forgefiend was easy: pins, glue, some filler. I knew that attaching it to the body would be a different matter. I cut the Rot Fly body until its curvature was about the same as that of the Arachnarok's back. Now, I knew that conventional pinning wouldn't be enough to hold the cannon in place. So, I got a much longer, thicker pen. I drilled a hole in the Arachnarok's back and a corresponding one high up on the Rot Fly body. I then put some superglue gel on both holes and fed the long pin all the way through. The superglue dried just quickly enough that I could position the 'tail'. Then I used a fairly large amount of poly cement to seal it. When that was fully hardened, I built up my PVA, tissue and green stuff method to both make the join more smooth and reinforce it a bit. Eventually, when I was certain that this was all completely solid, I clipped the pin off where it protruded from the Rot Fly. You can actually see a bit of it still, dressed up as a random spoke.
Attaching the legs
There really wasn't any easy way to do this. The end of the legs and the spider's body simply aren't meant to go together. It was a case of hack and slash: I cut the surfaces of both sides to be flat and then pinned them in place, with slatherings of poly cement. The gaps were big and ugly, so I built up flesh around them.
Webs
It's cotton glued down, coated in watered PVA and then painted. Sounds easy, doesn't it?
Think I might paint a rabbit next.
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