Ork Dreadnaught

Just stumbled across this cheap, cool upgrade and thought I’d share it.

I’ve had one of the old Ork Dreadnaughts sitting on my “to build” shelf for about, oh, twelve years now.  I’m not entirely sure why I’ve avoided it for so long.  Pretty sure part of the reason is that it’s a big chunk of metal, and that means lots of filing and gluing.  Plus a lot of scraping and swearing when the glue just doesn’t hold for some reason and parts drop off or never even stick. 

I just haven’t had the time for that.  Or the patience.

Plus, there’s that mild frustration because the new Deff Dreads have come out and they’re really nice.  The metal ones have always had a good, patched-together look, but the new ones had an unquestionable Orky vibe to them.  Which led to nagging regrets about not building the old metal one sooner and wondering if I’d be happy with it if I did.

 Anyway...

I decided to finally build it and only cracked one molar grinding my teeth when the legs kept falling off.  But while I did, I tried to think of something I could add or replace on it to bring it to a slightly more “modern” esthetic.  There’s so many extra back banners and armor plates and such in the Ork sets that my girlfriend and I have piles of extras.  There had to be something I could do to make the old Dreadnaught look a little snazzier.

Inspiration came while cleaning up my previous project.  A year ago, when I got my deal with Random House, I’d bought a Stompa to celebrate.  It sat in my office for about six months before I finally built it, and I was pretty happy with how it came out.  And there were more leftovers still on the sprue to check out.

One of them was the alternate faceplate.  The Stompa comes with two, and I had the more skull-like one left.  The Deff Dread has that big skull-face option, so I checked the Stompa faceplate against the old Dreadnaught, just for the heck of it.  Much to my surprise, it fit perfectly.  It’s the right size and it even matches the curve of the hull.

Even better, there are tons of these floating around.  Anyone who has a Stompa has at least one, which means you can probably give an old Dreadnaught a facelift for a few pennies at most.

I’ll post a picture of this guy once he’s done.  Assuming his legs stay on...