I've had a bit more time and now that my orks are done for the time being I figured I should get back to this project.
I grabbed some weapons off a friend but still had to buy 2 more heavy bolters off ebay. Maybe they'll show up in a week.

I lucked out and won some valkyrie engines for cheap on ebay as well, hopefully those are here this week. For now I'll share the rivets I've been adding and the bolter mounts.

Front view of TL Hbolters:


Front Hbolter Sponson:


Rear Hbolter Sponson underslung:


Rear Rivets:


Front Rivets:


I'm still hoping a guy at the LGS can find his Shadow sword Tubo laser to mount to the top. If not, anyone have one I could thief?


As for battle, I used this baby out with my friends in our first PlanetStrike game and it was almost overpowered. I think we're going to have to limit aircraft to one per side (as in I'll lend my thunderbolt to the guy without one and the other player will ensure he brings his). It ended up one sided with air support (my side had 3 craft vs 0). It didn't REALLY matter though since we couldn't hold off their ground forces and they won on turn 6 however if I'd been an attacker I think my team would have won by turn 3. Really fun anyway.

I'm borrowing a camera so these photos are a bit poor (Iphone), but I had to take a pre-paint photo. I'll have some grey-coated photos up on Thursday or Friday. I think everything is done. A few hundred rivets and some bits for detail it should paint up nice.

great job there Theambit,

cant wait to see it painted

this is definitely the best self-made-scratch-built GW-model I have ever seen.
Compared to it's size this is truely a master-piece. *bows*

Great work!

And I second that request for colour

This is just ... breathtaking! Great job Theambit!

The only thing that looks a little bit odd are the engines. They look a little bit too small to lift this monster. Nevertheless it is a great model. Now grab your brush!

-Shavaun

PS.: Where do you always get the building plans of all this scratch-built models?

Thanks for the kind words! This is definitely the most care I've put into a scratch build. Taking lessons learned from past projects and of course just putting in more hours. I'll start painting it after the 10 orks on my desk are done. It should be relatively easy to paint, you know, take brush and everything.



Yeah I heard that on dakkadakka too. The engines are definitely undersized compared to the stock model, but oddly I think they're actually the same length and width, however the FW model's are taller and go through the wing. I was at a complete loss on how to make engines that looked good and would fit the model, and all I could think of was the valkyrie ones. I've noticed that from top down they don't look too bad, but from straight on they're definitely a tad small. On the plus side since they'll be painted black they won't be drawing anyones attention.

The internet contains a wealth of plans. There's a group on Yahoo called BWC-Archive that once you sign up and are approved by the moderators, has virtually every vehicle you could imagine. Some are of course better done than others, and LackOfABetterName's are among the better. Usually the plans are very basic and just give you the shape of the model. You have to use your artistic license for adding detail (like all of the armour panels and rivets on this). I could probably help you finding particular ones if you PM'd me what you were looking for.

I'll be sure to keep you all updated.

I primed the 'bird and took some more pictures. I'll get to work painting it when I have some time.






When I go to paint it, I'm planning on doing the bottom & front faces of the plane black and bleeding the colour into scorch marks on the sides. What do you think? Simulating reentry burning. . .

Theambit, you are amazing. That is an absolutely perfect scratch built vehicle! I especially like the Broom Cannon you added at the top.

Now let's see some scratch built Tau suits!

it looks amazing!

and to paint the reentry scorches sounds great!

This has come out very nice, definitely one of the better scratch builds I've seen.

The engines do look a bit on the small size, but the paint should help. If you decide you want to replace them with larger ones what I'd suggest is the engines from Anakin's pod race toy, which you can find on ebay or second hand shops. They are almost as exact fit when compaired to the FW thunderhawk engines having the same length, width and very simular engine details.

Here's a pic for reference:


I used podracer engines on my thunderhawk, which has been sitting only half built for about 2 years, (but will be finished one day).

I really like your use of the rhino windows, I did pretty much the same on mine. I thought the armored slits were a lot more fitting on a spacecraft as opposed to the FW one that has a giant glass canopy.



Not trying to thread jack, just pointing out some cool simularities.

What did you use to make the rivets?

Also a couple versions of the plans I've seen floating around are actually quite a bit larger than the FW version, at least 2 versions of the plans measure several inches longer and the hull is much taller as it's scaled to hold a rhino insode the cargo bay. That makes the wings look a bit stumpy compaired to the FW version and may account for the look of the engines being smaller.

How long does your T-bird meaure and how tall is the hull?

I didn't use plans for my build, I just used scans of the imperial armor diagrams and scaled them up in photoshop, taped them to a poster board and worked from there. The diagrams in IA are amazingly exact and nothing was off more than a 1/4 inch when compaired to the actual FW model. Great reference tool if you can get the book or copies of the pages.

Scorch marks on the underside are definitely the way to go, I'd been planning on scorch marks coming up for about 1/4 or 1/3rd of the hull height and actually making the bottom look like raw blasted metal as it burnt up the paint on entry into atmosphere.

The rivets are made of styrene tubing cut up like green onions.

From tip to tail: 17.5"
Wingspan: 16.5"
Height of cargo hold: 4"
Width of hull: 3"

Yeah I'd heard of the pod racer engines but the only place I could find them they were $20 and I wasn't prepared to spend that much on a bit for a scratch build. I paid $7 US for the valkyrie ones so it was also a cost measure.

I have all of the IA books and I definitely used them for reference on where to place the detail, add armour plating, and rivets.

I'm jealous of your landraider door, that's sweet. Your rear wings look a bit thin though. They're quite thick on the production model. You should finish it up!

The racer engines are best if you can find a used toy cheap, the one I picked up was missing half the parts and ran me $5 plus another $6 for shipping. Wasn't too bad, although the toy plastic is a royal pain to cut through, my razor saw kept getting jammed in the plastic so I had to resort to a steak knife. Not a standard modeling tool but surprisingly effective. The wings are about a 1/3rd thinner than the FW version, but IMO I think the FW wings look way too thick. Thanks on the landraider doors I wanted to shake up the design a bit, the assault ramp will also be differant instead of the vertical slats I'll be putting a couple large panels with a huge templars cross smack in the middle.

I really like what you have it has just the right amount of tank bits, rivets and details. Most of the other hawks I've seen lack a lot of the little details and they look really bland. Your thunderhawk is going to look amazing once it's painted and will probably inspire a lot of people to try simular projects.

I finally found some time to finish off the thunderhawk. I'd babble on about it but pictures speak louder than words:




The painting isn't the best but it's done, and I'm far more proud of the modelling anyway. I took a leap of faith and dull coated the model (the first of my marines) and it doesn't stick out that much from them, but I think I actually like the more varnished look.

PS. Yes the engines are little, but there's 3 of them and it's 40 000 years from now

Theambit :
The solid color really brings the whole model together, even more so than the grey undercoat. I don't know how I had missed them before, but a ton of details really jumped out at me once I saw the completed pictures. I just had a look at the Forgeworld version as well, and the few similarities I saw don't detract from the model; in some cases (armored crew cockpit), I like your version a little better.

Nice job completing this project, and I can't wait to see what you have planned next!

I played my first 40k game in 3 or so months last week, and a friend game me a spare AoBR terminator he had.

So I modelled it into a librarian that I'd wanted for quite a while now. The right shoulder had to be greenstuffed into position and the 'inner' shoulderpad is all GS, luckily that's all I had to do as gap filling is about all I'm able to do with the stuff.

Here are a couple shots of my Terminator Librarian with stormshield.




And here is the librarian standing guard in front of my thunderhawk on my new skyshield landing platform. It's quite a large piece of scenery.

I'm SLOWLY plugging away at my Space Hulk miniatures but I havn't had much motivation to finish any projects since Christmas. I have 15 Ork Commandos sitting 1/2 finished on my desk as well as a shokk attack gun conversion.

Essentially I think I probably wont pick up my pace until this new Blood Angel codex comes out. I can't wait - Originally I wanted to play Blood Angels over Vanilla but didn't due to the lack of certain options I really liked (Librarian abilities namely). My army should fit in as a believable successor chapter.

Here's a my Space Hulk librarian, and a rough Sgt. Telion I converted up.

I recently became a real life grown-up and bought a house. Needless to say it has taken up a lot of my hobby time. With the release of this new book however, my marines have jumped ship to embrace what I'd originally wanted them for.

--Insert new codex hooplah here--

In my defence, I didn't bandwagon jump to Space Wolves, IG or Nids so I don't feel so bad ha ha.

Here's a Baal Predator I just had to get my hands on. I also took the spare bits and fashioned a TL Heavy Flamer for a razorback and a Flamestorm cannon. If you look close you can see the plasticard seems on the edges of the flame cannon guard and body of the turret. I've also made a spare turret with the auto cannon I had lying around from another predator. I was debating using magnets, but when you have a whole bunch of rhinos, it's much more useful to have the option of fielding two tanks instead of just swapping weapons on the one.



I also came across an amazing deal on tanks, and now have 4 additional rhino hulls, a land raider, a land speeder and a handfull of bikes for just $40 dollars! Once I get the 15 assault marines painted up that I've been putting off for the last month, I'll take a full force picture and re-shoot all of my other models; I realize a lot of the links on my main page are shot and of poor quality.

Been a while since I checked the thread, the thunderhawk looks awesome with paint and the Baal stuff looks good as well. Cool pose on the scout and the reworked arms look solid. Very good work on all of these

I decided to go nuts and bought an IG army online. My order hasn't yet been shipped but I'm not giving up hope! I've purchased from this vendor previously and they seem legit, I'm assuming it is just issues with out of stock manticores.

My current list idea is pretty dirty; avoiding that however, here are a few of my ideas:

-All squads in chimeras which I plan to convert to 'set-back' following a tutorial I've found. The chimeras will also have removable turret weapons so I can convert hellhound weapons for them to change in as desired.

-Veteran squads will be armed with special weapons and converted shotguns (from bolt guns).

-Sentinels to follow AT-ST design based on paulson games' models.

The overall colour scheme I would like to loosely follow is as such:



Could anyone give me their best guess at the main brown shade on this tank? I'm guessing khemri brown or graveyard earth but I could be totally off. My attempts to ask people outside of ATT has not yielded any results on other forums so I'm asking for your help!

I'm hoping some cool manticore conversion idea pops up before I start assembling them. I also need to find some inexpensive track guards as they seem not to be on the sprues anymore.

Why don't you try this? Just upload the picture and click the parts you want color info on. I wish I would have thought of this when we talked over PM's!