Centurion Vehicles: Razorback

I went to my local hobby store to buy a Rhino. I’ve been slow to get vehicles for my Centurions but with a recent spurt in gaming action around Gaffa, I figured I should get some armor. When I got to my sad little local hobby store, they didn’t have any rhinos, nor did the owner know when he might get some. He had one old style Razorback buried in a corner and I bought it instead. As I drove it home, the plan came to me.

The Razorback came with two weapon choices; twin linked lascannons or twin linked heavy bolters. I wanted to find a way to switch out the guns. Further, I decided to model the tank so I could also have it double as a Rhino if I didn’t want the turret on top.

Let me say that my motivation of the plan was two-fold. First there is the challenge of converting the pieces. Second, it keeps me from buying another kit from Games Workshop; which is good because I’m poor and they’re greedy.

Since a Razorback is just a rhino with a turret, the second conversion was simple: just don’t glue the turret on and model a storm bolter (rhino’s single weapon) to cover the turret hole. The conversion of the guns was more difficult.

Having used rare earth magnets on Pug, my Centurion dreadnought, I knew they’d do the trick. The problem was mounting the little magnets on the little guns and the little turret support and making sure the guns lined up and pointed in generally the same direction.

There were already alignment pegs cast into the pieces. I used those as a guide. I figured I could enlarge the recesses in the guns to accept a magnet and bore a hole in the support for the other. This I did. However, before doing that I carefully drilled two holes all the way through the support on either side of where the magnet would go. Once drilled, I placed on gun on the peg (which lined the gun up properly) and drilled through the holes into the gun. Then I removed the gun, put a gun on the other side and drilled through the holes the other way into the other gun. Thus I made alignment holes in all 4 guns. I later glued stiff wire into the holes of the support to align into the guns which were held in place by the magnets. It all worked perfectly.

Crafting a storm bolter for the Rhino variant was easy, since the kit came with one. The only challenge was to make a slender weighted rod to slide in the turret hole. I just filled a plastic pipe with lead shot, poured in some superglue and that was it.

I painted this Razorback while I painted my Whirlwind to keep them consistent. I started with a white primer, then realized it needed to be black and so painted it black. Then I thinned down some Dioxazine Purple Americana acrylic paint and airbrushed the panels, trying to keep the black in the recesses for shadows. Then I airbrushed a layer of slightly darkened Centurion lavender followed by pure Centurion lavender which really made it bright. To mute the stark contrast and blend the colors together, I misted the whole model with more Dioxazine Purple and the whole thing looked marvelous, simply marvelous.

I picked out the support bands with Bronze with silver rivets in keeping with my Centurion army scheme. I made the mistake to hitting the model with Testors Dullcoat. I wanted to protect the paint from the rigors of gaming, but I hated what it did to the metal colors - dulled them down too much. I’ve thought about going back over the metal with a gloss, but I’m lazy and I’m slowly forgetting how much better it looked which shiny metal bits than dull metal bits and am learning to love the piece as is. And I’m still lazy.

I’m proud of this little tank as much for the color depth I achieved as the clever engineering I used to make a more versatile gaming piece.

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