Hammerhead To Devilfish (and back again!) from TauOnline.Org

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Thanks to [maCe] for this.

This Tutorial is for creating modular hammerheads and devilfishes from the base chassis, adding on weapons, parts etc as needed. Inspired by the Tau Modeling tips page on 40K Online. There are several other hammerhead and devilfish related hints and tips posted on the forums, which really deserve a mention:

• Graphical Continuation of this guide - Using magnets inside the front nose turret (I haven't covered this part properly.)
• Ion Cannon Mod - Who said only Necrons could have clear plastic rods on their guns?
• An innovative way to allow you to add gun drones as an upgrade to your hammerhead! (It is a legal upgrade by the way, just no room for it.. until now!)
• Magnets on the Main Turret - This guide continued

Anyway, onto the main stuff. This article is available below, as a text only version, or in an (updated) PDF form. Below are the links to the PDF files, for the text only version of this article (please note it's in less detail) please keep scrolling down.

• Normal Version (2.50 Mb) - Normal quality pictures
• Low end Version (0.26 Mb) - JPEG compressed pictures. Low quality.

You will need Adobe Reader to view/print the files.

What you'll need. Text-Only version.

• 1 x Hammerhead Kit
• And a combination of the following:
• Blu-tac
• Magnets
• Green Stuff

What to do

1) Construct the hull: Only the main parts; don't glue on drones, engines, or the top crew hatch - for extra detail, hinge the side hatches. The rear hatch is designed to be hinged, so don't glue that on.

2) Construct the engines, railgun, ion cannon, weapons drone (Without any weapons), burst cannons, missile pods, and the top crew hatch (Hinge it properly) and the Fire Warrior crew member. Do not glue these parts to anything else!

The following should be left over: The 'C' piece and dome of the front turret, the turret ring, the targeting array, seeker missile and the sensor spine.

3) You can put the engines on now if you want, just don't glue them as it allows them to swivel etc.

The two key pieces

Your options from here on

This section shows how to handle the turrets, using either blu-tac, magnets or green-stuff.

Main Turret

• Use blu-tac and put a blob on top of the mounting piece.
• Put a magnet inside the top of the mounting piece then glue/stick a metal rod into the gun section so that it's held to the mounting piece, and probably glue the mounting piece into the turret ring.
• Mould an extra main turret mounting piece out of greenstuff, attach the original and the new one to each gun, and just pressure fit these into the main turret ring (Pressure fit works with the original, without any paint.

Forward Turret

• Use blu tac on the back of the T piece to stick it to the hull. This works fine most of the time, apart from the blu-tac drying and getting messy..
• Get some really small magnets, put it into the T piece so its flush, and put it in the corresponding hull area so its also flush.
• Sorry but I haven't found a way to do this easily with green-stuff- I'd suggest using one of the two methods above as they're easier.

What about the weapons?

The main turret should be pretty obvious, but what about the front one and the drones?

Drones

With a little bit of snapping etc, you can swap the guns the drones have between the smart missile system and burst cannons, just be careful not to snap the mounts!

Front Turret

As long as you didn't glue the 'C' piece and the dome together, this can all be held together in place without glue, once the 'T' piece is in place.

Targeting Array

Attach this to the front turret using blu-tac, or glue on some spare 'T' shaped sprues (Or simply something to hold it in place.)

And it all goes together..

This section shows how to handle the conversion between devilfish and hammerhead.

Devilfish

• Take the hull, fit the crew hatch to the top.
• Place a burst cannon in the front dome, place the 'C' piece over it, and use the 'T' piece to hold it to the hull using whatever method you decided to go with.
• Finish it off with gun drones/attach the sensor spine with blu-tac etc.

Hammerhead

• Place the turret ring on top, put the crew hatch in this.
• Attach main weapon of choice to this turret ring.
• Put weapons on the weapon drones, put them in their slots.
• Attach accessories: Seeker missiles, sensor spines etc.
• See "Mounting Targeting Array" below.

Pictures

[Devilfish and its components]

[Completed hammerhead with railgun and burst cannons]

[Completed Devilfish]

[Ionhead and all the components involved]

Front Turret - Mounting the Targeting array

I got around to working on the front turret, with the 'no magnets' method for having the targeting array and burst cannon swappable.

I did this by adding a 'T' piece of sprue that has a small lip cut into it so that it can glue cleanly with the targeting array. When finished, it more or less allows it to be held in place easily between the turret and the 'C' piece, whilst being easily removable (my previous tests ended up putting a lot of strain on the sprue and making it unfeasible as an option). It's approximately 3 mm between the piece and the cross part of the sprue, and the top of the 'T' is around 9 mm long.

Basically, when its mounted it can't move up or down, due to the chassis of the tank and the piece that holds the front turret in place. The only thing is stopping it from falling out of the front turret. So I cut a piece of sprue, glued it on, so that the sprue can fit within the mounting pieces of the front turret, as seen in the second picture above, whilst leaving room for the turret to be able to turn.

This approach takes the least effort and the least modification of parts, whilst keeping the burst cannon moveable when mounted in the front turret.

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