Weapon Conversions

Greetings denizens of the Dark City. I'm Fulgrym (not to be confused with She Who Thirsts' long haired pretty boy) and I've been a long time reader of this site and now decided to finally register and hopefully add some helpful modelling hints that I've stumbled upon.

That being said, one of the largest issues that it seems all models from all armies in this game have is that their rules allow them to have multiples of the same weapon, but the sprues usually have just one copy of said weapon. Thanks GeeDubs! Thankfully there are a few ways around this issue, usually 3rd party companies or bits stores and eBay are our saving graces. But sadly, many of those options are either expensive ($15-20 for a single haywire blaster?) or out of stock. However, our beloved Dark Eldar heavy and special weapons have very similar molds, specifically in the stocks and some of the furniture. That makes many of our weapon bits almost modular with each other. Easily, the three top weapons it seems that are in demand for Dark Eldar armies are 1. Haywire Blasters 2. Blasters and 3. Heat Lances. Whereas some of the bits that I find usually clogging up my bits bin are the dark lances from warrior and scourge kits and shredders. Using mainly the dark lances, I've found ways to kit out my models with heat lances and blasters without breaking the bank or waiting months on end for re-stocked bits stores, I'm still working out the haywire blasters lol. For all of these methods I recommend a glue that has a watery consistency. I prefer to use Loc-Tite glue that can be bought from a local hardware store or walmart and its pretty cheap, around the $5 range. The bottles with the black bottle and red or blue grips are the best, with red having the right consistency for these projects.

Let's start with the blasters since they are really the easiest. There are two options in making these depending on the look you want to go with and what you have lying around. The easiest, and best looking IMO, way is to take a dark lance and a hobby knife and simply cut off the barrel of the lance. Smooth out the end and voila, a souped up blaster complete with over-sized barrel and scope. I prefer these for my blaster born as they look to have a higher quality look to them that would fit an aristocratic trueborn warrior. The second option, if you don't like the look of the first one, is to simply take a shredder and a blast pistol, lop off both barrels of each and attached the blast pistol barrel to the stock of the shredder. This method has more of a slap dash, made in a low grade weapon shop look to it. Perfect for the rank and file of a kabalite raiding party.

Heat lances are also rather easy. They follow very closely to the first method for creating blasters. Grab a couple spare dark lances and the twin linked heat lance bit from a talos/cronos kit. Again lop off the DL barrels and remove the barrels from the heat lance and glue them together. Now pay close attention to the details of both the DL stock and HL barrel, along the sides of the DL stock as it flares outwards are slits that mirror those on a blaster, line these up with a single similar slit mark on the HL barrel. Just looks better IMO . There you have it, two heat lances for your scourge squads. These are also helpful if you are lacking the left arm bits with the top support grip as they allow for a regular left arm that cradles the barrel of a splinter rifle.

There you have it. Easy ways to convert excess weapons into high demand weapons.

Pictures to follow as I am writing this at 4am at work lol.

Cut down blaster from a dark lance

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Heat lance from the talos tail bit and 2 dark lances.

Ha! The dark lance with most of its body missing looks amazing as a blaster. Nice job.

I'm already using the Dark-Lance-to-Blaster conversion, but I'm giving those to the Warriors while the Trueborn have the regular ones, based on their combat role rather than their standing.