40k Project: Dreadnought/Hellbrute

I said these posts were going to be shorter... And they were, but still quite a bit longer than I imagined. This one should be short and sweet.

Alright,  the "Hellbrute", or what used to be called Chaos Space Marine Dreadnought: the Chaos version of a Space Marine Dreadnought. It's got a different name as of whatever edition, but it's still basically a combat walker controlled by the nervous system of an otherwise fatally injured marine. Plus some daemons, in the case of the Chaos version.

The arms on this guy? You guessed it. Swappable.

Except I don't have any alternatives, so at this point they're just posable/removable.

Since this already began as a Chaos model, I'll throw up an image of the stock model first:

There he is. If you're unfamiliar with the scale, he's around three inches tall to the tip of those smoke stacks, so a lot more massive than the models posted up to this point.

Now here's mine:

I gave him a larger-scale version of the Plague Marines' gut-plates (complete with hose with lever actuated lock/release mechanism on the coupling), thorough battle-damage, and replaced the tormented "more-machine-than-man" stock face with a giant eye.

 Otherwise I restrained myself from adding too many more details besides the sickly greenstuff growths. There's kind of a lot going on with the arms, I'll address that in a second.

The base, like all the rest used in the project, was made from plasticard.

I'll now post a few unprimed shots, discuss the various components used, and wrap this one up. You'll notice in these earlier shots that the left arm is a bit shorter. This is because the very tip of the guitar wire used to make the bit of hose closest to the body protruded a bit and prevented the neodymium magnet on the arm from sitting flush against the one on the body, making the arm prone to falling off. The magnet was probably on the small side for the job anyway. After trying unsuccessfully to cut the end of the wire with several tools I built up the fleshy stump seen above, with a larger neodymium magnet cemented right into it over-top the old one and offending wire.

 RARRGHHLL! I guess I added more detail than I thought. Mostly nondescript details like scum and growths in the crevices and between the toes and junk. Note the greenstuff pimple/eye (?) on the underside of the hand. I used blemishes like these on several models, and they were made using the tip of a mechanical pencil.

The smooth green gut-plate on this guy reminds me: I should mention that this was one of the first on which I used pastel shapers. They're silicone tipped paintbrush shaped implements that make smoothing fingerprints and other tool marks out of greenstuff WAY easier, to the point of being essential. Prior to this, I had painstakingly flattened all unwanted textures using ONLY the generic "sculpting tool No. 3". If I hadn't found pastel shapers, I would maybe be finishing this project like two years from now (with worse results).

 Bolts and rivets are styrene rod slices atop sprue injection port slices.

The hose coupling is styrene rods/tubes, and the handle mechanism is a sliced padlock from the skeleton-in-full-body-restraint-cage bit that from the multipart plastic Warhammer Giant.

 The ring structures where the arms attach were from the center of the sprues from some plastic Celts from Wargames Factory. These worked out well, and look pretty natural when dressed up with battle-damage and little bolts. Shouts out to my stepfather, Mannie over at http://toysoldiersforever.blogspot.com/ for donating those!

The eye was rather complicated. The Hellbrute was just hollow inside. The eye was the small, round, and difficult to handle. And there weren't openings to the inside of the Hellbrute large enough to make gluing the eye to the inside of those rings of teeth remotely convenient, plus if it ever got bumped loose it would be stuck inside and all but unfixable.

The eye was made from a bit (round vase/bottle with a mushroom in it) from one of the current Night Goblin plastic kits. I sculpted eyelids onto it, made a drill-hole on the back of it, put a dot of glue in the hole, fed the eye through the holes in the side of the body (not pictured, there were formerly holes where the figure's arms were sawed off), then I inserted a specifically pre-bent brass rod through a drill-hole in the Hellbrute's back (later covered with greenstuff details) and mated it to the eye.

 Lol, portrait mode. A bit of extra volume was added to the figure's back, namely the gross saggy portions under his ribs/vents.

So finally the arms...

The hooked blade on the Multimelta (gun arm) is a bladed gauntlet weapon (forget the fluffy name) from the multipart plast Ogre Bulls kit. The spike on the back of the gun (replacing a tube that originally connected it to the body) is a stalagmite from the Night Goblin Fanatics kit.

Not only do they come off, they're also longer and more imposing vs. the stock figure. It looks cool, but wasn't intentional. I struggled for a while to figure out how the arms could be made to fit into the rings I added. I decided I would make the arms end in rings from Wargames Factory sprues as well, and join them to the body with other pieces, hence the extra length.

I found suitable pieces from a very unexpected source...

 A previous edition Warhammer Fantasy starter box? I don't see it... Wait. There! Bottom left!

Dwarf P.O.W.! Obviously! Just cut him in half, put some greenstuff over his face and toes, maybe the back of his feet kind of look like a bone (?), add some magnets, and BOOM! You've got extended, removable, diseased space demon robot arms!