Chaos Land Raider Spartan.. I wanna make one!

While I've been spending most of my hobby time on my Eldar, I have not forgotten my Chaos Space Marines, my poor down-trodden traitor marines who are the red-headed scorned and neglected step-child of all the power-armor factions, not allowed to have any of the good stuff and having each of their own bits spiked with BS3 or appropriate substitute. Where was I... right!

When leafing through IA:Apocalypse, I noticed how awesome the Spartan Land Raider variant is. Not only does it carry 25 instead of a measly 10, but it also has more hull points and stronger weapons for a mere 3 marines more points. Less awesome is that I have three Citadel plastic land raiders. Two of which I bought as new kits before I understood that they are too expensive for what they do and one that came with a Grey Knights lot that I bought.

Google brought up this thread which has a very nice side-by-side view of the offical Forgeworld Spartan model and a plastic land raider. Very very close indeed. In fact, close enough to just go for using the Spartan rules with the plastic models. However, that wouldn't quite feel right. The rather obvious thing to do is to look at converting up the plastic model.

I figured that the mostly stripped Grey Knight land raider would be the optimal sacrifical test model. I ripped off the roof and the tracks before clamping it between two bits of wood which served as a guide and chopping it in half with a pull-saw meant for woodworking.

Then I took my clippers and scraper to some sprues and trimmed them down to strips. Plastic cement and wedging these in place between the two halves made quite a rigid connection. This picture shows most of them in place, I used a total of four in each corner of the hull.

I trimmed the roof part down to take engine cover and turret rings out. The Spartan tracks are supposed to be higher than the upper hull and overlap a bit, so the position of the proud bits of the roof has to be changed.

Which brings us to plasticard. I got some pieces ready to close the gaps in bottom, sides and roof. There will be additional pieces of trim to make it look less like the chop job it is.

Now I have to build up a ridge between roof and tracks, make tracks that look rough enough for the look, make the shield ridge for the spontoons and get enough laser cannons to make two quad-laser spontoons. Fun times! =]

I decided against the storm ramp that extends past the tracks on the original model because I don't want my variant to get stuck on everything and prefer it to climb over it using it's tracks. ;-]