Work In Progress: Leman Russ
Spent the Easter weekend working on another addition to my son’s Imperial Guard unit. This main battle tank costs upwards of fifty bucks in the store, but you can cobble your own together with a bit foamcore, a little plasticard, and a lot of patience. This is the result of one evening’s work:
It still needs a pantload of rivets and a decent paintjob to spiff it up, but I’m really pleased with the way it turned out. Once finished, it’ll look great on the table.
I have no idea whether this model is street legal or not. The boy only has the sixty dollar hard cover main rule book, so he doesn’t have all the rules needed to play. He’s got a lot of nice photos, but none of the point costs to build a legal force or even know what weapons are legal for his force. As much fun as it was to build this tank, it’s a great reminder of why Games Workshop games never really grabbed me the way so many small press games do.
Beautiful build. I think It looks better than the real thing. Your son should be stoked to have you building stuff for cheap!! Love IT!
I can't believe how quickly you manage to crank out models! It would have taken me a lot longer than two days to produce a cardstock tank like that. (It took forever for me to finish my cardstock Necron Monolith!)
At one time, GW had a policy that required models used in tournaments to contain a certain percentage of the components (70% or so I think) as genuine Citadel model parts. People using cardstock models were getting around that by building their tanks from GW boxes. (It wouldn't surprise me to find that they've since closed that particular loophole, however.)
It's also worth noting that back in the 1st edition Warhammer 40,000 days, scratch building models was encouraged. The rulebook even said that you could use any miniatures you wanted, at any scale! (That's one of the reasons that I play using the old rules.)
There was a brief renaissance when the 3rd edition rules came out, and the game included vehicle design rules that once again allowed scratch building and conversions. Unfortunately, it was short lived.
I suspect that the game designers at GW would like to do more fun things along those lines, but they simply aren't permitted to.