Lett 'em Rip! (Part 2)

WIP shot of the Rippers.

Once I got past the repair steps from last time I moved onto trying to get these things painted. 

First thing was to get their bases painted up. I did choose to add a skull to each base to indicate which squad brood that they are.  I thought that this could be a neat way to keep track of them during games. 

You might notice that there is an additional (fourth) base. This is because I plan to add at least three more Ripper bases to to this group. One such brood is a set of the 2nd edition era Rippers that GW put out in Finecast a few years ago. I was baffled at the time as to why they did this, but when I saw them at a local store I couldn't resist the variety that adding them to my  collection would bring. 

The joy of Finecast. 

But that's for another time, for now I wanted to get these thing s finished. I used the same steps and colors that I used on the Termagants. 

Mid-coats. 

And here they are, finished. 

So far I am pleased. I adore these models, something about them remind me of the horseshoe crabs that I used to see on the beach when I was a kid in Delaware. Anyway, hopefully I can get them onto a table top sooner than later and see how well they work in game as both wound counters and as annoying units for tying up enemy troops.  They probably get ovetwatched by flamers, but the ambition is there. 

Let 'em rip! (Part 1)

 As any tyranid player knows,  when building troop models you tend to accumulate Rippers. I found that I had a dozen of them. And it turns out that in 40k 9th edition (and now also in 10th)  Ripper Swarms have 4 wounds per base.

Three bases of Rippers. 

I decided to have each ripper count as a Wound token. So when the model takes a Wound, I remove an individual Ripper. I decided to accomplish this by using magnets on the bottom of the rippers with a sheet magnet on the base. The first few that I magnetized were stronger than the rest, so I will try to make sure I leave them towards the back of base to make it easier to move the model during play.

A strong magnet indeed 

Next came the basing materials. 

Grit and skulls. 

I added a few skulls to the bases and some grit. Trying to leave as much room as I could for the magnets to work of course. 

I started to basecoat these critters when I decided to take them with me to a game. Due to a lack of foresight on my part, some of my tyranid models were damaged by the heat when my car got too hot. One of these ripper bases was severely warped unfortunately, forcing me to re-do it. 

Yeah, there is no hope here. So I removed the skulls and removed the sheet magnet from the now useless base. It occurred to me while I was working on this, that I could use the number of skulls on the bases to denote the base number for easier cross reference to the roster. As I proceed on this project, that is what I am going to do. Let's see how far I get with these things in part 2.