Tutorial Tuesday: The Elusive Vyper Shuriken Cannon Upgrade

[Pre-game Groveling:] For large portions of my day of late, I've been saddled with an absolute dog of a laptop.  More of a crap top actually.  Between it and whatever pack of lies it has that's claiming to be IE, its eaten three posts now.  This was one of them.  Hence the lateness.  Please forgive me, faceless peer group!

I'm back with another Tutorial Tuesday!  We're back to Vypers (which are not here to vash and vipe your vindows) tonight AND we back to a tutorial that I have first hand experience with.  Well at least I should anyway. I wrote it!

Excuse me while I whip this out...

As much fun as the Eldar kits are to build and paint, they design decisions behind their production are still very much stuck in the wonderful world of GW design decisions circa the late 90's.  Lots of metal/plastic hybrid kits and lots of missing options.  To their credit, GW has been steadily getting rid of the things like the old fire prism and Leman Russ Demolisher kits.  However, its gonna be a while before the issue of the missing shurkine cannons get addressed.

Now, I can't help you guys with the Falcon, but I do have a solution for the Vyper.  And it only uses parts that come with the kit.

You'll need these two parts.  The red areas are the parts you'll need to cut away for this to work.  Important!:  the red areas are meant as a guide - they are not hard and fast.  Test fitting is your friend.  Also be careful when trimming the seat rib. that part will be very fragile and bendy. It will also be a good idea to have the canopy handy.

Here are the nubbins to cut off on the main body.  For the fore mention test fitting, I recommend assembling the upper and lower halves around this step.

Here are all the parts with most of the big trimming done.   NOTE: the trimming is not done.  Be prepared for lots of fine tuning as you work through this.  Be sure to click on this for the full size image.

I've now attached the seat rib to the main body.  At this juncture, you're going to be doing even more test fitting.  And then some trimming to make sure the cannon fits the way you want it.  See below.

Here we are.  Side view of the fully assembled piece.  Most of the trimming was done on the corner where the cannon meets the body.  The trick is to get the whole thing to sit flush with the rest of the body.  The plastic glue is your pal on this since it will help you fill gaps from potentially shoddy trimming and allow you to make sure the canopy fits right.

Bottom view of the assemble.  The one thing that will ruin this conversion is a crooked gun.  Check it from ALL angles and let the glue set before you set it down somewhere safe (so the gun isn't taking any weight)

Unnecessary top view.

So there you go, the holy grail of conversions - fast, cheap easy and good.  Hell yeah.

There's a shot of the finished product in this post, but I apologize for the poor image quality.  Look for a better pic later.