MODELLING: Brass Praying Mantis

I have a grand total of five days off work over Easter so I'm optimistic I'll get a lot of hobby stuff done. We're already two and a half days into the holidays, so what have I been up to?

What I should have done is paint up the Khorne Berzerkers that have been kicking around my painting table for the past month or so. Of course, I didn't.

Here's what I did instead.

Yes, but what is it?

It's my take on a Brass Scorpion.

I bought the Brass Scorpion conversion kit from Games Workshop mailorder before Christmas and I only just got round to opening the box. There were no instructions in the box to put the thing together so I went online and found some tutorials on the GW US site here. Unfortunately the extra sprues I had with the conversion kit didn't match the ones I needed in these guides. Specifically I only had one torso sprue. Of course, without any official instructions I had no idea whether I had got the wrong sprues by mistake or I was supposed to use a different design. What's an evil Chaos Overlord to do?


I remembered a sketch I'd seen in the Sabbat Worlds Crusade background book of a Stalk Tank in the shape of a praying Mantis. It looked really nasty, so I thought I'd have a go at building one. The crucial thing was that the mantis only had six limbs, so the single torso I had would be okay. The bulk of the work I had to do was on lengthening the legs. I cut most of the limbs at each joint and this allowed me to heighten the front legs especially. This was required to get closer to the mantis look but also so that I could use the abdomen as a mount for the demolisher cannon.


Once I had the legs sorted I built a frame to support the abdomen from an old dozer blade part. Once this was pinned in place I glued the Defiler main body to it. The mantis stalk tank is now starting to take shape but I have a long way to go to complete it.

At least it has got my creative juices flowing and I'll hopefully get a few more hours work done on it over the holidays. Watch this space.

Inbetween Apocalypse super-heavies I'm also working on my Phoenix Campaign battle reports (game 8 is almost completed and I've already played game 9). If you can't wait for those, though, you may want to check out this battle report involving my Plague Marines fighting Dark Eldar.