Custom Space Wolves Stormraven Landing Gears

Tonight I finished the landing gears for my Space Wolves Stormraven.  This wasn't so much because I wanted a custom look but because I don't have the originals.  I purchased the bulk of the model off of ebay for around $13 and have been piecing together the rest of it out of scratch.

I wanted the landing gears retracted because, let's face it, deployed landing gears don't convey a sense of forward movement.

The rear landing gears were the easy part.  I cut 1mm thick blank sheet styrene to fit the void left by the original model parts and followed that up with some corrugated metal sheet styrene.

The forward landing gears took a little more work.  I created a box of styrene based off of the shape of the rear landing gears.  I made these a little shorter as I imagined the gears would get tucked up into the fuselage.   In addition to the 1mm thick styrene I added .5mm thick styrene with small details cut in to add some texture to keep in style with the rest of the model's details. This was all topped off again with the corrugated metal styrene I used on the rear landing gears.

With this completed I moved on to working on the main engines.  I am using the intake ports on the F-35 and other similar fighters as my point of reference.  So far it is proving a bit frustrating so it may be a while before I make some real progress in this area.

Custom Space Wolf Stormraven - Update

I've finished my scratch built vertical thrusters and I have to say I'm quite happy with them.  The problem I had with the originals is that they looked more like intakes than vertical thrusters.  So I took a bit of styrene tubing and corrugated cable protector to create these.

Once installed they looked a good, but a little unfinished.  I thought they were a little too simple.

So I added a little bit of guitar wire and some heavy cable I made by wrapping wire around some styrene tube stock.

Now I think they looked finished.  Next step? Main engines.

Custom Space Wolf Stormraven

So I picked up some bits for a Space Marine Stormraven off ebay.  I didn't really have any plan when I picked them up, I just thought for the price ($13) that I could use them for something Orky in the future or maybe a piece of terrain or a kit-bash of some kind.

When the parts showed up I cleaned them up and started playing around.  I was happily surprised to find that for $13 I nearly had a complete stormraven.  That's when I knew that I would have to create a Space Wolf Stormraven in hopes that it would be completed by the time the new Space Wolf Codex hits shelves sometime next year.

I will be using styrene to fabricate the missing parts and to add some custom flare to it.  For instance I don't like the vertical thrusters on the current model or the intake ports on the main engines.  I plan on diverting from the original designs on those.  I also plan on magnetizing the crap out of this so I can adjust the weapons load to meet the unforeseen options in a future codex.  I also want to make adjustments to this and my dreadnoughts so that I can attach them to the rear section of the aircraft.

So far I've only gotten as far as creating doors from scratch.  Here they are,