USARF Conversions Part 1 - Marauders

Recently I have expanded my USAriadna collection by dozen models or so and as the range for USA models isnt that big yet, all of those were duplicate of models I already had. Personally I dont like to play two models that look identical so I have decided to do several weapon swap.

In this series of articles I will talk about the conversion I have done and do my best to describe how I have done it so if you are looking to do weapon swaps yourself, you can use this as a guide.

Part 1 - Marauders
Part 2 - Foxtrots
Part 3 - Girl Grunts
Part 4 - Grunts with Heavy Flamers

There will be some sculpting involved but I don't think any of these were complicated, myself I have only basic sculpting skills and all I used were mostly "standard" tools. So without further ago, lets get started.

Marauders 

This unit has the option to form Haris Link Team so I wanted to have three guys with different weapons; Heavy Flamer, Shotgun and Rifle to be specific. The current only available model comes with the Heavy Flamer and fortunately is in a such a position where weapon swapping is relatively easy. Basically all I had to do was cut away the flamer and then attach a new gun.

Bits used:
- Shotgun from 45th Highlanders
- Rifle from USA Grunt

First off, you want to cut away the Heavy Flamer carefully so you can use it later but if you dont care about it, you can just chop it off. But if you do want to use it later, first make sure to use your clippers to cut the bottom handle but leave enough under the hand so you can tell he is holding something.

Then I have used a small saw, but a knife/scalpel should work too, to cut the weapon in half. You don't have to cut all the way through, you can just cut in a bit and then gently bend the weapon few times and it should "snap" where you made the cut. If you have a small filer, I recommend smoothing the cut. On the image below I have cut where the red lines are:

Then you'll need to cut the weapons you are swapping. It doesn't matter as much where you cut them, the goal is to cut away the back part with the handle and arm. In my case, I was able to cut the rifle and have enough left it connected straight to the remains of the flamer but the shotgun wasn't long enough.

I did not do any positioning of the Marauder's left arm but if you want to spend more time on it, you easily could get the shotgun connect. 

 

I solved the gap by placing a small rectangle of plastic (cut away from a left over sprue) in there and then filling the whole gap with greenstuff. You could probably do it with greenstuff straight away. 

The same thing was done on the rifle as well, but there was barely any gap to fill. If you want you can also add some small details with the greenstuff to make it less obvious the weapon was swapped.

The gap filling is the only use of greenstuff on these guys. This is my end result:

 

All three of them are in the same position but I don't mind, its a very action front line pose and I like that.