Quick conversion: Deathwatch Infernus Marines

Last weekend I grabbed a copy of Combat Patrol magazine, issue #5, to get the Infernus Marine Sergeant model that’s currently exclusive to that series. Tonight I decided to assemble it — along with a couple of the Infernus marines from the Leviathan box — and to try converting them as Deathwatch marines.

The sergeant that comes in the magazine was a very easy ‘conversion’, in that while it’s effectively a monopose figure, the shoulder pads are at least separate items.

All I needed then, was the right new pads, which I had: a Deathwatch pad for the left shoulder (from the Deathwatch upgrades sprue) and a Space Wolves pad for the right (from the, you guessed it, Space Wolves upgrades sprue).

I also swapped the head for a Space Wolf helmet, because why not.

I got a little distracted at this point in seeing whether I could actually convert the Infernus marines that come in the Leviathan box but now that I’ve confirmed that to myself, I’ll come back to this model and Space Wolf him up a little more with some of the other SW upgrade sprue bits.

The models that come in the Leviathan box are much trickier, being push-fit models with the shoulder pads/pauldrons being part of the mould of the arms. The sprue duplication means you get two spare arms for the base sergeant model though, so that gave me a safe place to experiment.

There’s no great technique to what happened next, I simply started chopping away at the pauldrons with some clippers until it looked like a new one might fit; trying it on, finding where was still too large and repeating.

After much hacking away, I eventually got a new pauldron to fit, which encouraged me enough to carry on to the other arm that wouldn’t have a backup. 

So far, I’ve ended up with three conversions done: the magazine-exclusive sergeant, the base sergeant and a normal Infernus marine. In a recent ebay find, I managed to pick up two of the large Blood Angels upgrade sprues from the new box sets for a tenner, so the third marine got to be a Blood Angel.

Cutting away the pre-moulded pauldrons isn’t a pretty process, so I think I’ll stop at five rather than do all ten from the Leviathan box (I don’t currently have enough Deathwatch pads to do all ten anyway) but I’m quite keen to try painting these up and see how they look.

Autumn has most definitely arrived here though, so finding weather amenable to spraying undercoats may be tricky from now on!