So I have been toying with the idea of making a small force of Space Dorfs forever, mostly because I think GW is wrong and that the idea is no more silly than robotic undead Egyptians. Came across a couple amazing posts on Dakka and, I am inspired and blatantly ripping off some of the builds, because Woooo Space Dorfs!!!

So, 2 weeks out of back surgery and I can’t really sit for more than 10 or 15 mins at a time. Kinda puts a damper on any hobby work I want to do sadly so I’m trying to sort a good way to do a standing desk at home, already on one at work so that’s all good.

I did sit down in several spurts for long enough to knock this together. I needed a Logan “counts as” and I DESPISE the official GW fig, so, yeah, this happened.

So, I’ve been poking around with playing 40k again a bit now that I’m back stateside and have access to all my accumulated toy soldiers. Unfortunately for me, and my bank account… I tend to have a pretty string combination of ADD and sporadic OCD when it comes to kitbashing and converting things. I rarely actually complete a full army of anything or even stuff that is legal to field in game a lot of the time.

In an exercise to prevent myself from doing that I have started a small Space Marine list using the new Codex, only 1000 points assembled so far and on to painting. A friend of mine has challenged me to a 1850pt game using the Adepticon rules, so I suppose I will need to do some more work there.

In my never-ending quest to make cool looking minis I have ordered some various bits from different companies, below I’ll go through the companies I’ve ordered from and give my thoughts on them.

Maxmini 5/5

Wow! These are the cleanest resin bitz I’ve seen. No flash, no mould lines, super detailed, very good resin quality. No complaints whatsoever, will definitely be ordering more from these guys.

• Ashigaru Heads

Anvil Industries – 4/5

These are super nice, very clean bits. The resin is decent quality; I didn’t get any bitz with bubbles or broken bitz or anything like that. Very little mould lines if any at all. Very impressed with these bits, will definitely be ordering more from Joel.

• Robed bodies & Legs
• Roman Helmets
• Black Ops Heads
• Hooded Heads

Mad Puppet Miniatures 3.5/5

These are also very clean, detailed bits with good quality resin. The Pulse Rifles do not fit very well with GW guardsmen arms, at all. They may work better with the arm sets that Mad Puppet offers but I don’t know if I’ll be ordering those to find out. I will however likely be ordering more sets of heads, I liked the results I got quite a bit even if the heads tend to be a bit “samey”, but then that’s going to be the case with most heads for minis so… I haven’t got any of their torsos but may be doing an order for some of the Molle armor for my Ashigaru. The biggest knock here is really that they don’t have a lot of variety on their site.

• Boonie Hat heads
• Colonial Marine heads
• USCMC Pulse Rifles
• Beret Heads

Chapterhouse Studios 3/5

I really want to rate the Chapterhouse stuff higher just due to them actually being willing to go to legal battle with GW, but this is about the bitz. These sort of left me wanting. I’ve talked about the pieces a bit before. The legs for the truscale marines just feel… off, they are a bit too skinny and don’t allow the proper bulk for an Astartes, they end up looking like they are wearing skinny jeans. Do not want. The shoulderpads are largely decent aside from some weirdly designed ones that I will never use. The standard blank ones are good though, and I would order lots except that the studio doesn’t have their moulds set up to accommodate that apparently. The torsos are all awesome. I could see myself ordering a bunch of these, mostly because I’m too lazy to do the torso conversion to truescale from regular SM bitz. The same goes for the backpacks. Quality wise the bitz are only ok, lots of cleanup work and flash.

• Truscale Marines

Puppets War 3/5

So… these were a bit of a letdown. The helmets are very detailed and for the most part look great all of the bitz had a ton of flash and lots of bubbles which resulted in a lot of cleanup work. The pegs for the moulds full on break chunks out of the actual model a good portion of the time, Shoulderpads are decent visually, but they do NOT fit on regular Marine shoulders, or even IG shoulders so there is some filing on both the shoulders and the interior of the shoulderpads. The Katanas look good, but are super flimsy, I wouldn’t recommend them. Overall I think I will give these guys another shot for their helmet variants and such, I suspect any of the thinner pieces will have the same problems as the Katanas do.

• Samurai heads
• Samurai Shoulderpads
• Katanas

The Results

IG Recon

Using Mad Robot heads, standard IG kits and some creative kitbashing on the rifles.

Astartes Samurai v1.0

So these guys have the Puppets War bitz on Dark Angel robed torsos. I’m kinda meh on them. The newer revision that uses the Anvil Industries bodies and Grey Knight arms are a solid improvement. I’ll get pics of those as soon as I get some new Katanas.

Got to play some WarmaHordes over the long weekend. Pretty pleased with Kromac as a ‘lock. Mostly because he looks like a hobo wandering around with two giant ass battle axes who can turn into a giant beast hobo with two giant ass battle axes and Kromac your face.

Reading up on the tactica online for him, I’m not sure I will ever play a tournament competitive list. I tend to favor models I like over things that are the OP killy be all end all. Guess we will have to see.

So, over the past couple weeks or so, in addition to assembling and painting a small Hordes army, I have been working at getting my Space Wolves from 2-4E back into table shape, as well as assembling a bunch of old metals that I had and properly bulking out squads and such.

I have always been big on making sure my Wolfguard all look unique, it was a sort of design pillar in my army from the very start. Also, since I have always ran my Wolves as Bran Redmaw’s Great Company, I wanted to make sure I had a Wulfen in every pack. I’m really sad I can’t run an entire Wulfen pack of Wolf guard, just because the idea makes me laugh.

Trying to get acceptable Wulfen minis though, is rough, so I have worked up a few prototypes. Some have metal heads from the Warpborn Skinwalkers Hordes unit, and others are just kitbashes to look more feral than fully armored Astartes. I’m not sure which I like more, will probably end up going with a mix of both styles, right now I have enough heads to kitbash another 3 full on werewolf marines, will see how I feel after that.

Also, all of the Wulfen have had plasticard spacers added at the shoulders to bulk them out a bit, and a tiny bit of greenstuff at the torso, it actually adds just a tad of height that works quite well I think.

Mark of Wulfen prototypes, side by side

Howling Wulfen – This guy may be one of my favorite conversions in recent memory, really happy with how it came out.

And a test of a Wolfguard Terminator with one of the Skinwalker armored heads. Not sure I’m 100% sold on it, the pose is weak, but I think I’ll have a go of painting one up and see how it shakes out. The helm on this one is very loosely fitted so worst case I can just do a head swap later.

So, picked up some bits from Puppets War. Pretty pleased with them overall. Got shorted one shoulder pad which kinda sucks, but it’s really not worth having them ship one pad all the way from Poland. The helmets are awesome and the shoulder pads are pretty good, however they do NOT fit on regular Space Marine shoulders, there is filing of the SM arm needed as well as trimming the inside of the pads to make them actually set on the shoulders properly, not a big deal, just kind of annoying. The Katanas are only ok, they are honestly a bit flimsy, I’d like to see them bulk them up more like regular GW power swords. I have a second marine built out with a spear/naginata I’ll post the rest of the squad as I get them all built out.

Not  entirely sure what to do with them tbh, maybe use them as an allied unit here and there just for the sake of fielding a bunch of Space Marine Samurai.

4 complete. Sort of deciding what I want to do with the final guy who will likely be some kind of Sgt for the squad.