Converting the Venomcrawler

A few weeks ago, on a Weekender, Warren challenged me to convert a Venomcrawler. To be more specific, he said that he wanted to see me convert a Venomcrawler into an Imperial vehicle of some kind. I love doing this sort of thing, so I was only too happy to accept!

My first thought was to make it into an Adeptus Mechanicus unit of some sort. In 2013 I converted an AdMech Magos that is riding on the back of a spider-like creature made from Necron parts. I figured that would take some visual cues from that.

Fast forward to last week when I was able to pick up a copy of Shadowspear and lay my hands on the parts for the Venomcrawler. The first thing I did was to clip all the parts from the sprue that it shares with the Obliterators and lay them out to get a scope of what I was working with.

I was initially torn between creating a Castellan robot, making it a swift Sydonian Dragoon, or go for the larger Knight Armiger. In the end I chose the Knight Armiger not only because it had the same base size (a great visual indicator for a “counts as” model) but I also had an Armiger I was part way through building/painting, and could pilfer a few parts from it.

The next stage was to do some small assembly to check bulk and identify areas that would need to be removed if I wanted to bring it into the Imperial fold. I’ve circled these in red in the photos of the various parts. I’ve also added a photo of the AdMech parts I wanted to prep for use.

I hope you enjoy the rest of this project as I post updates 🙂