Thunderhawk: Part 5

I am not sure what is says about my bits box when I have enough weapons for a Thunderhawk just lying around....

The front heavy bolters are a pair of re-purposed Leman Russ sponsons. The heavy flamers were trimmed off and replaced with some scratchbuilt heavy bolter barrels.

Some stormraven lascannons solve the lascannon problem.

I threw together the under-wing heavy bolter mounts from some hunter killer missile brackets.
The missiles are from the Taurox (leftmost) and the Valkyrie (rightmost) kits.

The main cannon is built from the same plastic tubing I use for everything.

And here's a scale shot with a Stormtalon.

Almost finished. Next up it needs riveting, and then painting.

Thunderhawk: Part 4

We have wings and engines!
Though I did go completely off script with both.

The template would have given me two multi part hollow wings. For something that should be a gaming piece this would not have been solid enough.Instead I just used the outer surface pieces over foamcore board. The result is much sturdier while still being light enough that it wont stress the connection point..

The engines were an odd combination of good and bad luck.
Bad luck in that this exact moment I ran out of the cheap glue I was using to glue the hull layers to each other (hence the peeling corners you can see in the photo).
However it's good luck to end up with two identical perfectly sized tubes. I glued the cap on upside down, added some card bands to the outside and glued in an intake fan from some cheap toy or another.
BAM, engines.

Next I need to source armaments.
According the the Thunderhawk datasheet I'll need to find the following.

• 1 main cannon. (Scratchbuild from the ol' plastic tubing.)
• 2 lascannons (Maybe some IG players have spares?)
• 4 twin linked heavy bolters.... so 8 heavy bolters. Which need to match each other. That one is going to be the most difficult I think.
• 6 missiles. Possibly more difficult than the heavy bolters. What has spare missiles on it?

Thunderhawk: Part 3

It is starting to look like a Thunderhawk gunship now. Vaguely anyway.

I have had to go off script a bit, this is not the easiest template I have ever followed. The wings are a little stubby and I have yet to work out what I am doing about engines.

Do not ask me about arming this thing.

Thunderhawk: Part 2

Progress was going well...

until I realised I had built part of the fuselage back to front. 

Way to go.

Maybe half finished now.

Thunderhawk: Part 1

Everyone and their Granny has a scratchbuild thunderhawk project going. Partially because they are cool and partially because most people don't want to actually buy one.

Here is mine so far.

It's made using one of Eli Pateroch's excelent paper templates and layers of cardstock.

According to my plans this is the first third done.

I am not looking forward to adding all of those  rivets.