Metal Tyranid Warriors - making the best of a bad job

 I'm a big fan of the plastic tyranid warriors that were released at the time of Advanced Space Crusade. They're strange, well-cast models, and while they don't have many options for variety, they look interesting and they have lots of detail (not least at the back end of the warrior's deathspitter, where the warrior has, er, inserted his fist). 

And then we come to the first metal tyranid warriors. These are... well, they're awful. They are goofy and silly-looking, missing a lot of detail, as if the original warrior had been sketched from memory for a children's cartoon. The eldar, space marines and chaos marines of the time were an older style of model, but they were still good. The tyranid warriors aren't. 

Ugh

To be honest, even in the better metal tyranids - the carnifex and the hive tyrant - you can see the first elements of dippiness creeping in. The biovore and lictor were pretty ropey from the start. My suspicion is that these models were an attempt to copy John Blanche concept drawings too literally. 

In a fit of optimism, I bought two metal warriors from ebay and decided to see if I could raise them from "dreadful" to "okay". Both have venom cannons and rending claws. One was missing its head and one of its arms.

The original models don't have necks: the head squashes straight onto the shoulders. I cut the barrels off two Dark Eldar pistols to make suitably ridged necks and used them to raise the heads up a bit. I think this looks much better. 

The partial warrior got a left arm made from a plastic spinefist, cut and repositioned to fit the gun. This was quite complex and required a load of green stuff. He also got a head from a modern plastic warrior, which helped make him look more sensible. I cut out the tongue. Why can't GW make a tyranid model that hasn't got a silly lolling tongue?

They both required a lot of pinning and mucking about to assemble. The partial warrior was stuck in quite a "closed" position: this hides his banana-like claws to an extent and creates more points of contact, which makes it more likely that he won't fall apart. It also made him a complete sod to paint. Still, they got done. I think I've made as good a job of them as I could do.

Here's the "by the book" version, with his extended neck and happy-dog tongue.

Tyrannidus Derpi

And here's the incomplete version. I think the replacement head and the "closed" position helps a lot, although the model is always going to look ropey.

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