Building the Tau Riptide battlesuit pt. 2

Continuing with building the Riptide battlesuit. Last time I left if hanging with tack puty just to be able to use it in my game, where it performed well, not amazingly well but good enough for the first time.

Anyway, what's left is to magnetize and finalize the pose of the model. Personally I don't like the GW pose, its too kneeling, although it would have been way easier to use that.

Image taken from Games Workshop's website.

I wanted a more dynamic pose, more in the style of Gundam or Macross mechas, although the big gun doesn't help with that. So I cut all the "locator pins" on the legs and re-posed them, as well as the arms.

In the picture below the Riptide is protecting itself with the shield and getting ready to counter with the heavy burst cannon.

Menacing pose, I think.

I drilled 3mm holes on top of the thrusters to put matching magnets and use them as hard points for the weapons and support systems. As you see, the plasma guns go on the shield arm, I think that balances the model a little. All weapons have 3x1mm round magnets glued on them, so I have a magnet-to-magnet hold.

Another thing I did was to add extra mech details, not that the model lacks detail but I wanted to improve the sense of scale. Some time ago I bought some detail sprues from a japanese online store and these go really well with Tau. In case you want to know the address : http://www.hlj.com.

Compared with the lowly firewarrior and the feared Crisis battlesuit.

Now its ready to be painted in separate parts. The main guns are also magnetized, which was tricky due to the weight, I used a 4x1.5 magnet on the arm and one on the gun. The arms and shield will be glued after painting the model.

Stay tunned for when this guy gets painted!