Dark Eldar Venom Reversed Engineered.....

Ok so going on the picture of the Home grown venom that I found,

I decided to reverse engineer it and make my own, now I've tried to find how the original chap is so that he can get the glory for the initial conversion but to no avail? So if you do find him lurking somewhere on the net let me know ;)

What you'll need:

1 Viper kit
1 Raider Kit

So I decided to start off with the rear of the model first I clipped off the side panels and marked out where I was going to cut them

So after a bit of chopping and what not I stuck the rear part togeather...

And decided to start work on the engine block, again I marked where I was going to cut

I then grabbed the first part of the viper I was going to work on, again marking where the cut was going to go

And after a bit of a dry fit it looked like the following, Now I've removed the runes as I figured that the dark eldar wouldn't really have them all over there transports its more of a eldar thing, but looking at the picture I did miss some!

a differant angle of the above

And a quick dryfit of the actual viper or whats left of it..

And with the meduim of blue-tac what its roughly going to look like..

Now I didn;t really want shuriken catapults on the model due to the fluff factor and I like little details like that as they give the model the "pop" factor, so again the place where the cuts are going to take place, i.e. a slither of plastic to be used as a filler for the underneath of the viper weapons area.

So this is where I'd gotten to so far.. (I decided to change the pilot later on rather than using the basic eldar guy)

close up of the engine block stuck to the rear of the model, I'd stuck some addational engine bits from the other floor part that I hadn't used as a filler so that the gap wasn't too much

and after ripping the upper torso and arms off the orginal guy I cut one of the crew at the waist and used the drivers arms and clipped the "handle bars" away from the control panel

After a bit more dry fitting I put some more engine parts to hide the gap and these would be visable if you looked at it straight on, kinda giving the impression of air inlet ports?

So I decided to take the plunge and stick it all togeather, by this point I'd clocked up about 2/3 hours worth of conversion time but most of that was sussing out how the other chap had done his and most of the time was spent on the engine detail

a differant angle from above, I'd also started sticking the first of the spikey bits on

and a shot showing the underneath,  now I used the new style flying base housing from the raider kit and used the gun shield to bulk up the main viper bit that joined the engine block, I then had to go into work which helped as I wanted the basic model to be nice and dry when I worked on the next parts

Ok so after a hardcore shift at work I decided to crack on with the rest of the venom, but I forgot to take pictures as I was going along (I was way too excited about getting it finished!)

so all thats changed on this picture is...

I've used the rudders from the raider kit to give it a bit more of a "dark eldar" feel.
put some spikey bits round the rear and along the front of the viper canopy.

Converted some splinter cannons from the heavy weapons and stuck normal rifle bits on the front, these are differant lengths but still look cool.

Put some chain bits on the side of the gunshield.

A couple of more blade's on on the rear so that it extends the point of the rear blades but decided to leave a gap, so that it kinda fits in with the theme from the bikes. and an addational pair of blades on top of the viper wings and where the raider bit meets bit the angle of the pictures you carn't really make them out?

and thats it one venom!

not overly complicated, but looking at this model I'd reduce the spacers between the engine block and the rear of the viper, also make the rudder blade a bit further apart rather than nearly touching at the front.

But I'll sort out those bits on the second one that I'm planning on doing, now one thing that I did notice when looking at the codex on the throne (as well all do don't deny it!) is that the venom can take two splinter cannons thats a whopping 12 shots hitting on 3's and always wounding on 4's very nice me thinks!

Anyhow, what do you think? what would you change? or is that plently enough conversion wise??