Lucky the Carnifex

 A couple of days ago, I counted up my harlequin collection and realised that, instead of 34, I only had 32. I hadn't collected the set after all! Crisis! I went onto ebay and, half an hour and £20 later, had ordered the missing couple. But my goal of painting all the old harlequins is no closer. Perhaps I am the Ancient Mariner of oldhammer, doomed to never quite reach my goal. Or not.

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Anyhow, I found a box of old ork stuff at my parents', and in it was an old conversion of a carnifex. The plastic carnifex was a big deal when it came out: for £25 you got a huge monster with a ton of customisation options. It's still not bad although, like a lot of big Tyranids, it's a bit lacking in detail.

This conversion represents a carnifex that was "pacified" and "enhanced" by the orks: its lower body was made from the engine of an ork trukk and two old sentinel legs. A new power claw was added to the left arm. 

I stripped down the original conversion, which was cool but a bit basic, and added a load of details. The big wires came from a skaven kit. It then got a repaint in the colours of my old-school hive fleet (I think it's a splinter fleet from Hive Fleet Behemoth). The metal was redone to look slightly rusty and just a bit old. (For what it's worth, there's a decent argument that ork machinery wouldn't be rusty so much as very greasy, but still.)

Lucky the Carnifex was first encountered by the orks at the battle of Bugstomp, where it destroyed the dreadnought Gitkilla before being sliced in half. The master-mech Lugnuts, impressed by its capacity for mayhem, fitted the injured carnifex with a new lower body and a super hydraulic claw. 

It now fights alongside Lugnuts and his minions. The mek has named his new pet "Lucky": not because it had the misfortune to fall into the hands of the orks, but because wherever Lugnuts goes, hordes of Tyranids mysteriously show up. The Hive Mind, on the other hand, is fine with this arrangement. Soon it will tire of picking at Lugnuts' horde and, following Lucky's psychic presence, will send a force against the orks big enough to wipe them out. Everyone wins.