The Updated Raider Project

I recently purchased 5 3rd Edition Raiders and 2 3rd Edition Ravagers off of a friend at my local club. These were some of his first models, and the paint was THICK.

I have freed most of the infantry from their acrylic prisons but the raiders I decided to just paint over.

But before I could paint them, they needed a little "aesthetic update"

I had to make this:



Look good alongside this:



As you can see there is a pretty drastic difference

The basic idea was to remove the canopy and add a sail of some kind. Having a few spares left over from "Modern" raiders I had a stab at it. Here is the result, side by side with one of my modern raiders for comparison:



As you can see; very simple conversion but has yielded a good result IMO

I simply drilled a hole to hold the new sail (a 2.5mm Drill head was used if you want to make your own):



As well as shorten the sail slightly so that it can fit in front of the pilot:



Finally here is the first of my two ravagers, after a hefty reconstruction effort its finally being repainted in my own colours





Also, I just noticed this poor gunner only has half a face!



I shall name the ravager in his honor. (Probably Bisector or something like that)

All in all a very easy conversion but i'm happy with the final result! I have 3 raiders done so far, but another 3 raiders and 1 ravager to go.

What do you guys think? Cohesive enough?

Eye of Error did a couple Raiders along these lines here and here. (I don't know if there any pictures of them painted out there.)

Personally, I think the only thing the old Raider needs to look good is the same thing the new models need to look good - a good coat of paint. That said, I don't think they're stylistically cohesive, and I would not mix and match them in the same Kabal/Coven/Cult. I do like using them in the same army with different subgroups - a Kabal that uses modern raiders, and a Wych Cult that uses the classic ones, for example.

That's just my tastes though, of course.

Nicely done I would say that the sail brings them much closer to being visually cohesive with the newer ones.

I wonder if the only (drastic) thing that could be done to bring them even closer is to smooth down the ridges on the prow so they're a single concave panel (like on the newer Raiders) with maybe some lines scored inbetween.

That's a fairly major undertaking though, so I'm not suggesting you need to do it! Just wondering out loud really...