Speeding across the Land

This time the post is about old Land Speeders. Specifically the middle child of the family. The second edition speeders have always been one of my favourite minis in general, and are definately the best version of the Speeders in my opinion (I'm not much of a fan of the Rogue Trader flying couch - please don't make me turn in my oldhammer card).

The evolution of the Land Speeder. From left to right we have Rogue Trader, 2nd edition and 3rd edition and onwards. Pic belongs to GW.

 Last week after the first proper post of this blog (not counting the introduction, that was more of an "about this blog" type of a thing) I was contacted by an army buddy of mine - technically we were in the coastal forces (part of the navy) but  "coastal forces buddy" just sounds dumb, so I'm going with "army buddy". Anyhow, he had seen the blog and told me he had an old Ravenwing Land Speeder he had no use for that he'd gotten as a part of a lot and asked whether I'd have any use for it. I did and do, so he gave it to me. What a chap! We met up and chatted about the hobby for nearly hour and a half until I had to leave (had an early shift the next day), after concluding that we should have a game at some point in the future.

I did not expect to be able to finish the speeder this quickly. However, I've been home, sick, yesterday and today (we have a very bad flu wrecking havoc at work, now that I'm home as well everybody from our location and several people from the other two locations has been on sick leave within the last two weeks and we've had to close early several times due to lack of personnel), which gave me time to finish it between spouts of sleeping and reading (pretty much the only three activities I've had the energy for).

Gunner's side

Pilot's side

I think it's fairly obvious I still need a lot of practice with free hands and the pinwash, but overall I'm pretty happy with it. The change in scheme and on the shade of green has really done wonders for my motivation. I haven't had this much fun painting marines in a long while. With these versions the biggest hurdle isn't the actual painting though. It's the basing. The weight is ridicilous. When I was doing my other speeder a couple of years ago I spent more time, money and effort on the flying base than the mini itself, nothing held it in place until I got some ridicilously strong epoxy from the hardware store and strong magnets, and even then it still took several layers of epoxy and several days of hardening (this time it was sturdy enough for pictures after maybe 16ish hours, but I separated the mini and the base and left it to dry more after taking the pics, just in case). Seriously, you could rob a store with these things. Just throw it at the window or clobber the clerk with it.

The Land Speeder is attached to the flying base with magnets and a ton of epoxy.

Aaand I just noticed some green on the Heavy Bolter skull from the pic. That needs to be fixed.