Completed Stalk Tank

I devoted this week to finishing my Stalk Tank, which I'm finally ready to unveil. Though Dave Taylor beat me to the punch and finished his first! It's okay. His could beat mine in a fight anyway. :)



When I set out to build a Stalk Tank, I laid down a few ground rules I wanted to follow:

• Since I'm not very good at scratch-building with plasticard, and I had a number of old Sentinels and a Defiler in my bits box, I would use as many Games Workshop bits as possible; and
  
• It had to more or less match a Sentinel in size, since I intend to use it as one when gaming.

Now, one of the things I greatly enjoy when converting vehicles is finding new uses for bits. A lot of orky vehicles are great examples of this. There are so many ways you can reuse a bit to make something totally different. My Stalk Tank is composed mostly of Sentinel, Defiler, and vehicle accessory sprue bits. Below is a picture of it before painting, along with a short explanation of how it was constructed.

1. First, I made the thorax by taking two Sentinel hips, cutting off the fronts, and gluing the back halves together.
   
   
2. Next, I took the support struts bit from the IG dozer blade assembly, and cut the middle out before gluing the two halves together. This forms the upper part of the thorax.
   
   
   
   
   
3. Since I felt it needed more length, I added the two other, smaller pieces of the dozer blade assembly.
   
   
4. With the thorax constructed, I began work on the legs by chopping and repositioning ones from a pair of Sentinels. They were connected to the main body using the small toes from the Sentinels, since these are angled just right.
   
   
   
   
5. Sentinel feet are much too large and flat, so I took the blades off the legs of a Defiler and added them to form pointed feet.
   
   
   
   
6. To make the abdomen and accompanying pilot's cockpit, I cut down a Sentinel body and attached it to a piece of plasticard (the only time I had to use the stuff). I pinned the abdomen to the thorax and added some Chaos-type edging to the plasticard.
   
   
   
   
7. Figuring that the arms would probably be ball-jointed for maximum flexibility, I used a pair of Chimera lasguns for the main part of the arms. Then I added a couple of blades from the old-school dozer blade.
   
   
8. To connect the head to the body, I used guitar wire, figuring that it would allow the head to swivel and look in any direction.
   
   
9. The head itself - specifically the sensor array - is the mantlet from the defiler's missile launcher. The eyes themselves are actually the plastic vents that you chop off when building the missile launcher. I hadn't removed them, and the whole thing screamed 'insect face' to me, so I went with it. :)
   
   
10. After attaching the guitar wires to the head via the eyes, I glued the IG Heavy Weapons team lascannon and shield to complete the face.
    
    
11. Finally, I added armor plates from the Defiler and Track Guards from the IG vehicle accessory sprue, along with spikes and trophies.

It only took a day to paint, since it was mostly metal and armor plates. Wham bam, done! I'm not sure whether I'll construct more of them, since I don't think I have enough Defiler bits without purchasing another Defiler. I also kind of like the way it will look by itself during a game - psychologically menacing, but really just ~50 points of Sentinel. With the new codex coming out, it'll definitely fit as an Armored Sentinel. Hooray, front armor 12!

Apologies for the lousy light levels in the pictures - I'm still futzing with my photography techniques, and I'm in a bit of a hurry as I'm taking the wife to Cavalia tonight, which I'm told is a bit like Cirque du Soleil but with horses instead of people. For some reason I can't get the image of the Carnivora Circus from Ravenor out of my mind...