OK. So it's time to do something about the last bunch of grey plastic sprues I have. Most of my leadweight is composed of built and primed or partially painted stuff, but I do have a bunch of T'au stuff still on sprues. This is, of course, the most exciting stuff, as it is the most like new stuff! In the photo below are two Crisis Battlesuits left over from my Start Collecting! box that my wife bought me for Christmas more than five years ago, a handful of pathfinders and the Stormsurge that I bought with money from selling my Eldar earlier this year.

Of course, by far the most exciting model in this pile is the Stormsurge, and seeing as my son got a Knight Castellan for Christmas that is already built and partially painted, this had to be the first model to build.

I wanted to do something interesting with the base, partly because it was so big and partly because my son said I had to! So... I had some spare bits from my guard so I thought I would use these to tie the model into another part of my collection. I'm using a 3D printed turret that came spare with some tanks I got cheap on eBay a few weeks before Christmas, and the one spare guardsman that didn't find a place in my army. I'm not going to bother doing any complicated chopping with the turret as I can cover some of it with gravel and/or sand to hide the slightly odd connection in the middle:

First stop for the Stormsurge: leg assembly. Now... I knew the legs wouldn't fit right on the custom base if I built them exactly as per the instructions, as I wanted the thing to stand on the Leman Russ turret, so I removed the little tags that fit the notches to give them more freedom of movement. For example, that sticky-out squarish bit on the joint in the middle piece had to go.

Partial leg assembly underway in seven sections:

I did attempt to blu-tack the pieces together to test the positioning, but they kept falling apart and wouldn't hold, so just bit the bullet and put glue on every piece. I found this with my Ghostkeel previously - I just had to hold them together in a weird Gollum-esque fashion to get them to stay put how I wanted them until they were dry enough to hold. Ended up with this, which I think works OK:

The Leman Russ turret has that nice flat bit behind the cupola which was perfect for the foot to stand on.

Can't decide whether it is going to be sat back and pointing to the right (left as you look at the photo) or aiming over the bent knee and looking more like it is moving forwards to the left (right as you look at the photo). I will have to play about with it at a later stage (N.B. The other T'au in the photo belong to my son - just in case anyone thought I was fibbing about how much I have to paint!).

Last step of this blog entry, I added the guardsman to the base. I was going to add the whole guy with the melta, but then I thought "no, I'm not going to give him such an easy shot right up at the Stormsurge's knackers (!!)," and decided to chop him up. There is a nice arm holding a helmet on the old command squad sprue, so I gave him a bare sergeant head as I wanted him to be obviously shouting in fear or generally freaking out. 

Unfortunately, I still needed to chop the original guy to pieces to get at his body as I don't have any torsos spare, which was a shame because other than that he was built with all new parts. A couple more bits from the command squad sprue and a spare lasgun from the heavy weapon sprue finished the model. I've got him running away from the wreck of the Leman Russ and dropping his lasgun in the process - I know, an offence definitely punishable by summary execution!

And that's where I'm up to for today. Got to go and make a Sunday roast now!