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Thanks to Johnathan54 for this.
Greetings! This is my first attempt to both do, and write about a conversion so please bear with me. One of the things that has always frustrated me about Warhammer is the options. I love them! But I can never decide what I want. And as we play with the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) rule, I'm constantly torn between playing with options that are effective only some of the time, and having to buy hundreds of models so I can have all the options. I'm the type of player that micro-manages my army list. While Option A works wonders against Army X, it does nothing against Army Y. The Assault Terminators in particular frustrated me. $50 for 5 and I couldn't maximize the weapons. Do I go with 20 Lightning Claw attacks, or 15 Thunder Hammers? Or mix it up? One day I want 5 T.H's, another I want 3 T.H's and 2 L.C's. I don't want to spend $500 to make sure I had everything. So I decided to use the Tau Battle suit magnet method.
I started by base coating my termies on the sprue, then cut 'em off and trimmed them up. The first thing after that was attaching the shoulder pads to the arms. This is very important because when we're drilling the shoulders out, a few times I would drill all the way through the arm into the pad. I also decided to glue the legs onto the base, but this is not necessary.
While the shoulder pads were setting, I pulled the magnets out of the Magnetix. Usually hitting it with a hammer is fun, but you run the risk of smashing the magnet, or having it shoot across the room and giving your dog something to investigate. I suggest placing it in a Zip-Loc or something and then bashing it.
Also, this is a good time to prep the terminators back shell for the magnets. I used my hand drill to drill out the head rest. The magnets are about ¼" diameter, so drill out all but about the top 1/3 of the head rest. There is a small hole in the back, basically cut that and everything under it out. Also, you need to carve out the front half as well, so the shell halves fit together. The red line is where I drilled that out.
Test the shell with the magnets. Just let the magnets hold themselves and put them in. These are nearly perfect width to rest in the shell. Also, make sure the front of the shell fits snuggly. Modify as you need too. Then glue them in and the shell halves together. Use Green Stuff to fill any gaps.
Next we work on the arms. Hold the arm up to the torso to see where you need to drill out a hole in the arm. As I mentioned above, you may end up drilling through the arm itself and into the shoulder pad. That's ok, that's why it's glued on. Keep testing the hole for width with the magnet but don't worry about depth just yet. Drill all 4 arms.
Next step is to put the magnets in. Make TRIPPLE sure the arm magnets are aligned to the torso magnets!!!! You don't want to glue a magnet in, and discover it's in backwards and will only attach to the wrong side of the body. After checking alignment, check the depth of the magnet in the correct direction.
After the correct depth is found, test the magnet again. Then glue it in.
On the torso, you can see two small protrusions where normally the arm would sit. Use a file to get rid of these. The magnets in the arms will stick out a little and make up for it. Otherwise the arms will stick out way too far and that just looks funny. Also file off the back ¼" of the head so it fits in the torso properly. That's what the super small red text says.
Glue the head in, and the torso to the legs. Then let the arms fly on!
Hope this helps you out and didn't confuse you too much! Enjoy!
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