AoBR Dreadnought to Nurgle Dreadnought Conversion

I've been working away for most of this week, so I have managed to get anything painted, however, I did take my tool box with me and got some conversion work done. I picked up this Assault on Black Reach dreadnought from ebay pretty cheaply:


I was pretty surprised by the model, it's really well detailed. I'd definitely buy a load of these if I was doing a Space Marine chapter. Of course, I'm not, so this was going to fall to the power of Nurgle :)

The first thing I needed to decide on was the weapons. It comes with a multi-melta, but I also wanted to have the option of taking a plasma cannon. These are the standard arms:
I thought I could probably get away with just changing the barrels on the MM arm for a plasma cannon barrel as plasma cannons sort of have pipes and stuff like that on them. With some conversion work I managed to get them magnetized, and got the front part of a 2nd edition era plasma cannon also magnetized. Here's a close up:

As you can see I cut off the front part of the MM and drilled it and fitted two magnets (2mm wide by 1mm deep). I also drilled corresponding holes in the arm and fitted 2 more magnets with reversed polarity. It was pretty important at this point to make sure they stuck together. I then painted my arm magnets with a bit of orange paint and pressed the plasma cannon piece to them to give me two marks to drill and fit magnets to. I then drilled and fitted magnets to that piece (two 1mm holes took me 20 minutes each with a pin vice, I need to get a Dremel...). This method also means I could add other parts in the future by magnetizing the barrels. I have a spare twin linked lascannon that would probably fit for example.

From that points it was on with the green stuff. Here's the final finished product with multi-melta:


....and with plasma cannon:

The helmet and daemon mouth are Defiler parts, and the whole thing has plenty of green stuff applied. I didn't magentize the arms, they're just on the pegs they come with. I might have magentized them had I got any magnets big enough.

I particularly pleased with the close combat arm:

This was done using horns from the Chaos Spawn box and then using a flat needle file to file a flat section at the thick end. These were then glued to the fingers of the power fist and the joints smoothed over with green stuff. I did briefly consider trying to magnetize the bolter and having a heavy flamer option, but I couldn't work out an easy way of doing it.

I also found a bit of time to work on a squad of Nurgle Chosen. I only got time for the first 4, so here they are, they just need 3 more to go with them:

Edit 8/6/09: The dreadnought is now painted and you can see the finished model elsewhere on the blog.