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[reserve, pics]Ragnar Blackmane Conversion

Submitted By: Date: October 21, 2005, 06:36:59 PM Views: 7129
Summary: <p class="body">I'm sure many of you are aware of how un-dynamic the Space Wolves characters are. <br /> A good example is Ragnar Blackmane (below)</p>

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I love the history behind this character love the detailing of the minature but he is just, well, standing there. He is renowned for charging into battle and doing lots of damage close-up. I feel this figure just doesn't do Ragnar justice. Not only that, but a few of the details are silly. Take the chains across his chest for example, if he was to lift both of his shoulders up or backwards he would actually strangle himself! I will therefore be getting rid of these chains and have the wolf fur attached to his right shoulder pad instead.



So this guide will do the following changes to this model:



1. get him into a charging stance

2. have him aiming and looking down the barrel of his pistol as he does so

3. change his hair so it doesn't look so stupid

4.change a few of the details on his chest I don't like






Firstly I cut Ragnar's pistol arm off with a junior hack-saw so I could reposition it later:


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Once the forearm was removed I cut out the elbow portion of the arm and discarded it.



Next I needed to cut off the shoulder pad, again so I could reposition it later. I did this by firstly drilling several holes into the shoulder pad from below to hollow out the inside. This would allow me to saw shallowly from the sides of the shoulder pad and so make it easier to remove. See pics below:



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Once the above steps were done and each part was cleaned up a little using a hobby knife, Ragnar looked like below:




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Once the shoulder pad was off it made it much easier to saw off the head:




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My second concern was changing his leg position so that he is running and I thought it would be easiest to alter his left leg. Firstly I used a very small drill-bit to make holes at the front of his hip joint (top of picture below) and in doing so I was able to do this without ruining the details at the front of his leg. Then I drilled behind the pouches, cut gently above the pouches with a hobby knife, then sawed from below aiming towards the groin area. This left a small slither of metal at the top of the hip joint, which made the leg easy to remove by bending it to and fro:




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To make it look like a running stance I needed to bend the leg. After gently removing some of the pouches off the top portion of the leg. I sawed above and from behind the knee joint (bottom left picture below) before gently bending to give a more bent knee joint (bottom right below):



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Once bent, I decided to remove the other pouches off the top portion of the leg to be repositioned later. After testing how the running position should look by playing with the pieces and cutting off pieces of metal to make sure they would fit together properly, I pinned the leg back onto the body:



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At this point I decided to remove the chains on Ragnar's chest with a hobby knife, but kept the "R" tablet for replacing later. I have always liked the wolf chest-plate found on the Space Wolves accessory sprue, so I cut it off the chest plate and (after trimming it down from behind a lot) placed it onto Ragnar's chest with the help of some super glue.



I also removed the over-the-top hair Ragnar has, carefully removed scrap metal then sculpted the Wolf shoulder pad till looked like the picture below, and used a plastic space marine arm to attach to Ragnar's pistol.



After doing all that I ended up with what you see below:




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After cleaning-up the pouches a little with a craft knife, I reattached them to the upper leg area and used a little green stuff to tidy it up a little:




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Now that I'd finished with all the detailing I'd need to do on the lower half of the model, I pinned Ragnar onto his base making sure that he was leaning forwards a little (as you do when you run). I also pinned the arm back onto the body aiming to his left a little:




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Ragnar's head was then pinned into place making sure that he was looking down the barrel of his pistol and a piece of wire was bent carefully to make a necklace from which the "R" tablet could hang from:




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After gluing the shoulder pad back on, some green stuff and a pony-tail from the Space Wolves accessory sprue was used to create his hair (I actually tried a few hair styles before I settled on this one!). A little green stuff was also used to alter the wolf skin so that it attached to one of the chains on the back of the shoulder pad:




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All that was left to do now was to attach some wolf teeth to the other chains on the shoulder pad and to do a base. I used some more green stuff for the base so that the ground appeared un-even and used one of my warlock heads in my bits box (from yet another conversion!) to finish it off.



And here is the finished model ready to paint:



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