My Minotuars army will have a Thunder Hammer and Storm Shield equipped squad of Terminators. These guys will be Asterion Moloc's personal bodyguard and as such I wanted them to be absolute beasts. They needed to be bigger and meaner than your regular Terminator.
One of the first things I could think of was to give them some seriously heavy weapons. These guys are the Bulls of the Minotaurs after all.
Here is a picture of the very first scale shot against one of the Bulls. It is big... You'll notice each iteration made it bigger still. At this point I had replaced a Deathwing Thunder Hammer's actual hammer head and the cross piece. I swapped out the haft for something taller. I added the bulls head to the rear face of the hammer to add a Minotuar motif to the hammer. I considered calling this done... However, I now felt that the hammer was off balance with the side used for swinging now being too light..
To counter the weight of the bulls head I overbalanced it the other way... At this stage it started looking a bit over the top.
I then added some panels to break up the large open spaces of the new hammer head. This helped a lot I think to make it look less like a cartoon weapon.
RIVETS!!! Something has to hold all those plates onto the hammer. Here you can also see my first iteration of the handle detailing. Again I reworked this a lot as it was crucial to making the final weapon look pretty.
This time I used my tube tool.. At which point I realised I should have done this before attaching the haft at the beginning of the build! Annoying but this is how we learn.
After messing around with the tube tool on a few attempts at the handle I broke the hammer from the haft by accident... I took a break from working on this before I trashed it completely.
With the haft unattached from the hammer head using the tube tool was simple and I achieved a good finish very quickly.
I will always do this first now!!
Here it is reattached with a little more detail added to fix the break. Also you can see how the actual Bulls are coming along. These guys best look good because I have spent a lot of time converting them.
The finished product.
Now I need five hammer for the unit so I am going to be casting these up. Building this four more times would have driven me a little nuts.
Now I have the pleasure of the casting process driving me crazy ;)
-Martok