Jetbikes are WYSIWYG again!

At last weekend's game 6 of my jetbikes had invisible shuriken cannon. That will not do. My Eldar may be my first ever 40k army and certainly not the best painted. But it is WYSIWYG.

Just to recap, my current Windriders list has the following jetbike squads:

3 jetbikes, all with scatter laser
3 jetbikes, all with scatter laser

3 jetbikes, all with shuriken cannon

3 jetbikes, all with shuriken cannon

3 jetbikes, 2 with shuriken cannon

3 jetbikes, 2 with shuriken cannon

And why the eclectic load out? Why not all with shuriken cannon or scatter lasers? For the simple reason that I already have 4 jetbikes with shuriken cannon, and I only have 6 of the new scatter laser bikes, and 6 shuriken cannon bits from those new bikes, which I can transplant to retrofit my older bikes. When I do find 2 more shuriken cannon bits, I will find the 20 points and retrofit the remaining 2 jetbikes which are still armed with shuriken catapults.

And it does work out nicely that the scatter lasers are all mounted on the new jetbike models, while the shuriken cannon are all on the old jetbike models (you can tell by the varying bases that the old models themselves are from several different generations - I really should clean up and get rid of those old hex bases).

Since I already have 4 of the old jetbikes with shuriken cannon, I wanted all the shuriken cannon jetbikes to have the same kind of look, with the cannon barrel potruding from under the left side of the carapace. Incidentally, of the 4 original shuriken cannon jetbikes, only 2 had the old metal shuriken cannon bit, while the other 2 were converted from Vyper turret shuriken cannon bits.

The conversion itself was pretty easy. As usual, I never think about taking step by step WIP pictures, so I did the graphics below to give you a rough idea. The original plan was to remove the twin-linked shuriken catapults from the old jetbikes so that it's easier to work on the conversion, and then putting them back onto the jetbikes. But plastic glue will never cooperate with that crazy plan, so I had to do the conversion with those shuriken catapult bits still stuck onboard the jetbikes

So I took all the rescued shuriken cannon bits from the new jetbikes and cut the barrels off like so:

Then I cut the twin-linked shuriken catapults like so, finishing off with a good filing to round off the edges, as only the monkeigh have hideous sharp edges:

Then I simply glued the shuriken cannon barrel from the first step to the cut-down twin-linked shuriken catapult housing, and ,.. presto! (just realized that in the graphic below the cannon barrel is upside down - don't do this)

Repeat as necessary, which in my case was 6 times. The result is pretty convincing, and with a little bit of paint, would be close enough to the ol' skool jetbike shuriken cannon look.

Next, to paint the 6 new jetbikes, the 6 new shuriken cannon, and the Hemlock. And I've tweaked the list a bit. I've replaced the Falcon with a Wave Serpent to transport my Fire Dragons, and I've decided to swap the turret scatter lasers with bright lances instead. Thats's for another time.

Keep rolling them dice!