Greetings fellow Tau’fann,

I have been lurking (without registering) on ATT since July 2011. During that time, I have learned a lot; this place is literally brimming over with inspirational ideas for projects.

Greatly inspired by a multitude of models on ATT (:no-one mentioned, no-one unintentionally overlooked ), I have just finished my first major conversion project.

My pathfinder rail rifle team needed their own Shas’Ui. I imagined him acting as a spotter, using his binoculars to find suitable targets for his ’La. This is how he ended up looking:



Heeding the Membership Primers’ advice to “put some serious effort into my first post” and erring on the side of pretentiousness, I would like to present you with a step-by-step tutorial on how I did the conversion. Hopefully, it can serve as further inspiration for some.

As this is my first attempt at a major conversion using parts from several models, as well as writing a tutorial, any critique and suggestions for improvements are most welcome - both with regards to the conversion and the guide.

I used the following model components:



1. Body of pathfinder kneeling with rail rifle
2. Aerial attached to rail rifle
3. Bent right pathfinder arm with pulse carbine
4. Tank commander arms with binoculars (from Devilfish APC sprue)
5. Bare Tau head (from plastic firewarrior sprue)
6. Bonding knife (from plastic firewarrior sprue)
7. Long SM pouch
8. Round slottabase
9. Greenstuff
10. Pinning wire

(Please note: Where possible, I left part of the sprue/feeding canal attached to some pieces, as they gave me something to hold on to, when later painting said pieces).

After cleaning all components of flash, I first carefully cut and sawed the left arm and head from body of the kneeling pathfinder (see photos below). The arm went into the bitz box; the helmet was needed shortly afterwards. I also shaved away the grenade and one rail rifle ammunition round from his belt (the remaining rifle round was left on, for the ‘Ui to hang his helmet on).



Additionally, I drilled a hole into the right shoulder joint for later insertion of wire for pinning.

Then it was time for repositioning of the left leg. The original figure was already in a kneeling posture, with the legs in roughly a 90 degree angle to each other. This posture is very stable when shooting. However, it is not “natural” for someone kneeling, while looking straight forward through a set of binoculars. In the latter case both legs should be pointing more-or-less forward.

Therefore, I carefully cut and sawed away the left leg across the thigh joint (yellow line indicated in photo below). As you can see, the metal tab below the feet accidentally snapped off during the cutting/sawing process. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as the figure actually became easier to position on the slottabase afterwards:



I then shaved quite a bit of metal off the inner thigh (hatched area on photo above), while continually testing the fit against the left thigh area. This was done to make sure, I would get a good fit when the thigh was repositioned (incidentally, this cutting and shaving operation will become much easier, when/if these figures are re-released as Finecast).

Then I drilled a hole and inserted a length of metal wire into the left thigh and pinned the left leg back in place, only now pointing a bit more forward then before. At the same time, I likewise drilled a hole and inserted metal wire into the left shoulder joint in eventual preparation for attachment of the right metal arm holding the markerlight carbine:



Then I lightly carved the neck of the body to accept the bare Tau head, and superglued it into place.

A small anatomical tip: when gluing the head on, make sure to keep the eyeline (:the horizontal level across the eyes) of the figure horizontal relative to the base/ground; even though the figures upper body may be leaning to one side (indicated by a yellow line on photo below).

This is done to keep the pose more natural. Notice what happens to persons in real life, who are looking at or focusing on objects in the distance, but whose upper body is leaning slightly to one side: they automatically tilt their heads in the opposite direction to compensate, in order to keep their eyeline horizontal with regards to ground level. This is the effect I was trying to achieve here:



- and (as you probably guessed) my crummy repositioning of the left leg was what unintentionally resulted in the upper body of the Tau leaning slightly to the right. This actually gives him a more dynamic posture (anyway, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it).

Next step was to carefully remove the aerial attached to the rail rifle and superglue it to the side of the head:



Then it was time for some greenstuff work.

I created the cable by rolling a 1 mm-thin sausage of greenstuff onto plastic board with a thin film of water. The greenstuff sausage was then attached to lower end of aerial and further down the torso to a point, where it would meet the corresponding cable on the pulse carbine. The correct double-stranded look was achieved by using a needle to score a thin line in the surface of the sausage while it was still soft. I also cut out a section of cable, where the disc-shaped thingy should fit. The disc on the aerial cable was made from a 1 mm round blob of greenstuff, which was pressed flat into the gap and sculpted with said needle. If you look closely at the photo, the sculpting on the aerial cable disc is absolutely appalling, but luckily this was covered up by my painting later on.

Finally, I used greenstuff to fill and cover the gap at the thigh joint, while simultaneously resculpting the left buttock:

Back to the decapitated head; I followed one of Taels excellent mini-tutorials and removed the hood from the inside of helmet using a knife and a metal file, giving me a loose pathfinder helmet (1).

I also cut off lower third of long plastic space marine pouch (3) and glued the bonding knife onto its side. These were then superglued together to the back of the figure (2+3) and the helmet was superglued to look as if it was hanging on the spare rail rifle round (1):



Then I took the tank commanders arms with binocular and carefully removed the right arm, so that only the left arm was holding the binoculars:



I also drilled a slightly oblique hole through the shoulder joint of right arm, so that it could accept the metal pin (not shown).

By then I had the following parts before me:

1. Body with head
2. Right arm with markerlight carbine
3. Left arm with binoculars

As I am a somewhat detail-obsessed, but otherwise slow and mediocre painter, I painted the body and the arms separately, before gluing everything together:



Before joining the right arm to the body, I cut the metal pinning material down to size. Unfortunately, despite numerous “dry run” tests on arm position, a gap appeared under right arm and shoulder joint – this was filled with greenstuff and painted over.

Final thing was to touch up any painting flaws on model, base the model, and add the Shas’Ui to my pathfinder sniper team:



Here endeth my attempt at a modelling tutorial; as mentioned above, critique and suggestions for improvement are most welcome.

Tau’va!

Shas’Saal Li’now

Very good tutorial!

As a slight note for anyone doing a similar conversion, the Forgeworld Tetra kit comes with four pathfinder heads with the awesome swoopy helms. While they are made for the pilots, you could always give the pilots normal Firewarrior heads and mix the resin pathfinder heads with normal Firewarrior plastic parts to avoid a lot of the metal pieces.

Also you painting is quite good and much better than mediocre fby far.

Wowser, that's an impressively detailed tutorial!

Adding this to my faves / reference folders as I'm planning on getting some Pathfinders at some point and I prefer to paint the parts prior to assembly myself too.

Some *very* nice conversion and painting work there though; He looks like he should come as part of the original squad

@Both: Glad you liked the tutorial; I was worried if the step-by-step style was perhaps *too* detailed. Also, thanks for the very kind words about my painting .

@Blackstorm: Very useful information on the Tetra set. Are there any spare pathfinder heads in the set, or just the four heads needed for the Tetra crews?

Great tutorial. I might be taking some ispirations from it since I bought few pahfinders lately.
Accidentaly the one needed in this toutorial is there too What a suspicious coincidence.

Anyway You made a great deal of work preparing this tutorial and it is apparent.
Your painting is'nt even half bad. In fact I'd be happy when I advanvce to such level.

Solid tutorial, smartly painted. This is exactly what the community likes - to the Modelling archive with you!

- Tael.

Some damn fine conversion work, it looks quite natural! And your painting is far from mediocre, in fact I think its quite good

Again, thanks a lot for the positive feedback; it means a lot to me (especially with regards to my painting skills) – and an especially big “thank you” for the promotion

Wow, this looks great! Really well done. I really like the small change you made to the Marine pouch; small, but very effective.