Mind Over Matter

Im branching out into one of my other armies with this post, my Grey Knights. Specifically my Grey Knight Techmarine, why should my co-authors dominate the space marine demographic, i can be a good guy too!

See! good and happy.

This was one of the first Grey Knight models i bought. i think, apart from thinking he looks cool, i really like the duality of the unit. A Grey knights nature makes them sort of an outcast among space marine… But so does being a Tech Marine within your chapter.

Talk about specialist, the entire chapter has the most specific and strict elimination/training process of all the space main chapters. First you would have to be one of the small percentage of people with psychic ability that hasn’t managed to kill themselves horribly yet. Then you would have to be discovered and picked up by one of the inquisitions Black Ships… They are like the people that catch stray dogs, but assume all dogs can accidentally summon things from hell). Then, you have to be of sufficient psychic strength and the right age to be considered for the The Grey Knights. THEN… in addition to the usual rigours of having to survive the trials and the transformation into a space marine, they have to another set of trials for their minds.

Find Tommy’s Shell and hunt daemons in Space!… fail and we feed your soul to a skeleton in a fancy chair.

This is just to be a Grey knight in the first place, as with all space marines, the ones destined to become tech priests have to then go to mars for a while to train with tech priests and learn their machine religion and how to fix stuff.

Grey knights are a secret organisation so not many people know they exist, those that do often don’t like them, and they are specifically trained to deal with the threat of daemons. Techpriests maintain the machines for just this chapter and have to split their devotion between their chapter and the Cult Mechanicus, so they are never really accepted the same way by their own chapters. (with the odd exception…)

“The flesh is weak!”

So they are VERY specialist. I think its interesting, and i remember when i got the first stand alone codex, seeing the picture inside i thought “that’s cool”.

At this time i think my co-author Krakendoomcool had already started his Wolf Lords, or at the very least been showing me models he had converted to match the units artwork in the Space Wolf codex. I thought this was awesome but had never really tried it and wasn’t sure i had the skill, resources or time (or inclination) to do it.

This would be the model i tried that with. I wouldn’t necessarily try to match the pose exactly but i wanted him to have similar gear that would mark him unmistakably as a Grey Knight Techmarine.

 

I got the Techmarine kit that came with 4 Servitors and more importantly the BIG servo harness. The model was thankfully finecast by now so that would help with the conversion. All i really had to change was his head gun and melee weapon. The head was a relatively simple swap, just replace the standard head with an iconic Grey Knight helmet. I chose the Apothecary helmet from the terminator kit because of the extra sensor array attached to it seemed appropriate. The Grey knights are all armed with wrist mounted storm bolters which i think look cool and the artwork had one. I also threw on a shoulder shield to display his heraldry on the gun arm.

Lastly was his weapon, I didn’t really like the fat axe handle with a skinny bit in the middle of it and in the art the Techmarine has a force sword anyway. I didn’t like the way he held the sword in the art though and there was another weapon I liked more that was unique to the Grey Knights, the force warding staff. So i cut the axe head of the staff the Techmarine kit, turned it 90 degrees so it was symmetrical and cut cog teeth into it so it still had a link to the Cult Mechanicus, but wasn’t like the omnissian axe the Techpriests often wield. The tricky Bit with the warding staff is that I wanted to keep the Adeptus Mechanicus symbol on it, but now that I had turned the axe, the symbol would be sideways. So I had to cardfully cut the symbol away from the axe without damaging it and then stick it back on in the right orientation.

 

And there it is! Sadly in the new rules i cant give him a storm bolter so ‘thinking of cutting one of the barrels of his bolter and making it a combi. I suppose when I do that I should give him a bit of a touch up with some paint too, looking at these photos there is so much potential for me to improve it, I’ll put it on the ever growing to do list.

Anyway i hope you like the result, i do and enjoy seeing him take to the battlefield, usually with his clunky robot friend… But that’s an article for another day.

Have you converted anything to look like its artwork? Do you like the attempts we’ve made? Please drop us a comment and let us know, we enjoy hearing from you!

 

~Pandora’s Bitz Box~