Reaper Squadron reporting – Converted Leman Russ HQ

I’m currently helping a friend to refurbish his Cadian Armored Company for the upcoming Cadia-campaign and to give his army some teeth. During 2016 I painted a Destroyer Tank Hunter and a pair of Bombards for him and now we’ve moved on to the heavy armor of the force – his 5 Leman Russ tanks. In this article I’ll show you how I converted and painted a pair of Punisher armed command vehicles.

The state of the tanks when I got them. The turrets had to be replaced from scratch and they also longed for a nice camouflage paint job…

Extreme Tank Makeover – Leman Russ edition
Since the tank chassis of his army are from an older (4th or 5th?) edition and we had new turret bits on sprues I had to re-fit the entire base of the turrets. The new Russ kit has a really nice and sleek turret design but it also comes with a much smaller socle than the old ones. In order to fit them on to the older tanks I had to cut away some of the plastic rims and create a makeshift base for the magnets that would connect the turrets to the chassis. 

Making a set of Punisher cannons
Punisher cannon bits are hard to get your hands on if you don’t want to spend a fortune on oversea shipping on ebay and they rarely come up in our area so we agreed to make custom punishers inspired by modern day 30mm automatic cannons. I used plasticard pipes from GaleForce9 which I cut to length and fit into the base of the regular battle cannon barrel. I also used tubes with larger dimensions to create a better transition between the gun barrels and the cannon, as well as making a reinforcing metal band at the end of the gun. These extra layers helps to blend the plasticard pipes in with the rest of the turret and gives them some decent width.

 

 

 

 

 

 

After making sure the barrels were centered and leveled correctly I set them aside and started to work on a suitable commander to be used as Knight Commander Pask. I had one of the crewmen for the IG superheavy tanks that looks really cool lying around, but I wanted to do something interesting with his pose. So, I cut up one of the plastic commander arms (the one with two fingers in the air that looks a bit silly!) and repositioned it to make it look like he’s giving orders through his helmet comms. After greenstuffing an elbow I let everything dry over the night ready to be primed the next day.

A tank commander issuing order to his company.

I also fitted some spare tank tracks to the side of one of the turrets. This adds a lot of character to the model.

The old hull mounted weapons were cut off and replaced with new, magnetized, ones.

The finished product
Here are some photos of the tanks after I re-painted them (withouth a proper pigment treatment on the tracks due to the current cold weather that keeps me from sealing it). Unfortunately I got the ISO settings on my camera all wrong so they came out a bit more yellowish than they actually are. Overall I’m happy with the result and the camo scheme ties them in really well with the rest of his tanks that I have already painted. When the dust settles, I think I’ll jump on to his chimeras! What do you think of the conversion and paintjob? Have you converted punishers of your own? Let me know and leave a little comment below, it helps a lot!