Could Use a Hand Here

So the biggest problem with converting my 11-man Necromunda Gang to a 90+ man IG regiment is getting them to look like WYSIWYG guard army. The picture above is a bog-standard Necromunda Ash Waste Ganger with no paint or modeling done on him yet. You might notice that he has no hands. The hands come on a separate sprue:


The sprue on the right is the necromunda hand weapon sprue. It has hands holding one-handed guns and knives. The center sprue is the necromunda longarm sprue, which has longarms, but no hands. The left sprue is the ash waste ganger weapon sprue, which has the double-bladed knife and various really cool-looking longarms, but no hands. For a Necromunda gang, it's not a problem: you just throw single-handed weapons onto the empty wrists with superglue. But for an IG army, it's more of a challenge. So I came up with a few solutions:


My early efforts involved sawing the arms off of models, which I don't do anymore. But since I had some guys with no arms from failed experiments, I made them into rocket launcher guys using Steel Legion rocket launcher arms.

In the foreground is the best solution to the need for special weapons as longarms in particular. The pistol grip on a plasma (or melta) gun allows one of the standard models to wield it true-grit-style in his right hand. Probably most of the special weapons will get this treatment.

The slung-rifle solution pictured above is another idea that seems to be working. On the left is the unmodified model. The center is a model with a plastic (kroot) backpack and the rifle attached next to it. On the right is the same model with the rifle slung directly to the soldier's back with greenstuff and primed. With the addition of straps, these solutions look feasible and allow me to put whatever into the hands of the models and be WYSIWYG.

The guys above are demonstrating three different solutions to the hand problem. The green-colored right hands are Panzergrenadier hands from the Tamiya kits pictured in the background. Each of these kits costs only a couple of bucks and comes with dozens of green plastic hands that are a bit large, but feasible if you paint 'em as gloves. The open grip of the Tamiya hands, unlike the GW models, allows you to put pretty much anything into them and get creative.

These Tamiya kits also come with backpacks and ammo packs and messcans that can be used with the slung-rifle models to hide the fact that the rifle is just basically stuck to the back of the model., and make the nomads look more nomadic.

The model on the left has a plastic Cadian lasgun in his left hand--the right hand gripping the handgrip of the lasgun has been cut away and replaced with a handless handgrip. The model on the right has a beastman left hand with the double horn--an idea lifted from the original Troll magazine ad for this army that looked really cool.

Finally, a full 2/7 of the Ash Waste models already have autoguns or Nomad longrifles posed a high carry. So these guys just need cleaning and painting, and they're good to go.