Plague Marine reinforcements assembled

I've cleaned the metal plague marines which I got recently from eBay, slapped them on magnetized bases and now also put the 4-6 bits that each of the very old models get into place.

The result are eight squads with seven plague marines each. Each squad containing a champ with or without special weapons, four marines with standard gear (bolter, bolt pistol, knife) and a marine with plasma and flamer for the special weapons allowance. The two very green squads in the front are the Finecast squads which I already had.

I get that I will hardly ever use ten seven man squads, but this way I have plenty of models to mix together. Want a champ with different gear, different special weapons, no problem. There are five marines left over and a spare metal Typhus, a couple of Plaguebearers and a great unclean one which will go through the priming and a couple of the steps afterwards together with the metal marines.

All of the very old plague marines came with blank shoulder pads. I considered getting some of the nice 10 piece metal shoulder pad sets from GW, but the look I liked was showing 4-6 weeks delivery time. I've considered using some green stuff with or without a silocone mold to get some dots going. Then I tried something that looks actually pretty close to the original pads the newer models come with - engraving!

I've used the Dremel bit in the picture below. It has a 2mm wide ball shaped cutting head. Putting three shallow marks in a triangle takes just a few seconds. The shoulder pads are thick enough that there isn't a real risk of going through them by accident. A bit of cleaning is needed to tear free any bits of plastic stuck to the edge, but I'm quite happy with the result.