DreadTober 2020 Kickoff - Dark Angels Legion Leviathan Pattern Siege Dreadnought

 

Welcome to the 262Kriege DreadTober 2020 kick-off.  I love a good blogger challenge and DreadTober 2016 was my first foray into community painting challenges of any sort; although I lurked that year and did my own thing without formally joining the challenge. Since then I've been a regular participant.  Inspired by Siph, I put together a quick family photo of my prior DreadTober projects.

Four Years of DreadTober

This year, I'm going to assemble and paint a Dark Angels Legion Leviathan Pattern Siege Dreadnought to join forces with last year's Legion Contemptor and a Deredeo. I picked this kit up from Forge World as soon as it was up for preorder and I've been waiting and waiting to get soe mpaint on it.

I picked up three arms to start with and plan to magnetize everything so I have plenty of options for how to arm this beast. I'm starting with a storm cannon, siege claw, and grav-flux bombard.  Here is the resin goodness ready for assembly.

I always start with the legs to get a good pose.  For this project, I elected to go with a shard of bluestone left over from our front porch and walkway replacement last year.  As the workers left for the day I would find loads of stone chips laying about and collected many of them for "later"...

This chunk of stone will give the Dread something interesting to stomp over while providing a good deal of weight to prevent it from toppling over during play.  I opted to swap the knee pads from the Forge World art, otherwise this is built stock and held together with the usual two-part 5-minute epoxy. Honestly, I'll never go back to super glue.  It's a bit fussier to hold things until they set, but manageable with some experience.

Here the model is standing tall, ready for magnets.  There is an optional phospex discharger on the roof and the torso-mounted volkite calivers and heavy flamers.  All parts are easy to magnetize with a little drilling.

Any magnets that fit will do.  I'm terrible at remembering the sizes...these might be 2mm x 2mm rare earth magnets?  They are definitely thick and not the 1mm thin ones. Anyway, plenty of grab for the purpose here. A key skill here is planning ahead to be sure you have polarity correct as well as positioning so the two parts line up how you want in the end. The magnets will line themselves up and you want to be careful things don't end up off center.

When drilling holes to mount the torso weapons, I got one hole in the wrong place...well, no matter....a little green stuff solved that issue after I mounted the magnet in the correct hole.

And here the weapons are all ready to go.

Magnetizing weapons like this is becoming pretty routine around the 'net, so forgive me if the pics here are a bit redundant. 

Here's the beast standing with all of its parts. The roof is not glued down yet, so I can get the head painted separately and attached. The dread is not attached to the base either, and stands balanced on its own at this point.  I'll put some more work into the base to add interest to the large chunk of stone.  Then I'll be building and magnetizing the arms.  I'm looking forward to getting everything into the spray booth for priming so I can get this painting party started! 🎈🎉🎆

 Best of luck to my fellow DreadTober participants from around the globe.

Stay safe out there.

Cheers and Happy Gaming!