Warhammer 40,000 – Imperial Fists Call to Arms Pt 1

Ladies and Gentlemen. Friends of the middle aged metal miniatures. I am happy to announce - We are starting with the first full project into the Warhammer 40k 2nd Edition!

We have a deadline, everything has to be battle ready on April 18th for the Chaosbunker Classics! We have an army, the Imperial Fists! And we have a rough scope for our Call to Arms! I do not have to paint my entire collection of Space Marines for this, but around 1,250 to 1,500 for our narrative event, which makes it more reasonable for a 3 month time frame.

Fortunately the hunt for this project is done. Meaning my earlier article series on sourcing old models, and I can concentrate on preparing, building and actually painting the miniatures. First beginning with sorting out roughly the amount of miniatures that I will need to fill the army.

But before that I grabbed a jar, filled it with paint stripper and separated the miniatures from their bases and plastic parts, to just strip the metal. You can strip metal with acetone or turpentine, but plastic and most kind of resins will be dissolved or turned into a gooey mess. Therefore if you have plastic or resin parts you want to clean, go for Isopropanol / IPA and moderate length, as you do not want the material to become brittle.

I stripped a few terminators, vehicle parts and characters to have a proper starting ground. Especially as I want to make sure that I cleaned up all the mould lines and flash from the miniatures. The better the preparation, the less hassle during painting, the better the final result.

Once the metal is clean, the next challenge is making the models complete and era-appropriate. With a retro project like this from the mid 90s, you mostly have metal miniatures (with maybe some monopose plastic miniatures) and plastic vehicles. Many of these miniatures had metal bodies with plastic accessories for the arms or weapons. These might be difficult to get your hands on, depending on the army. Thankfully in 2026 you have various options, for example 3d printing to fill those gaps. In addition, Imperial Fists received their own set of bits towards the end of the 2nd edition, giving me further options.

I have enough of the original stock to take care of this project, I'll go into detail in the individual reviews of the units, which plastic bits and pieces there were and which you needed to complete your models.

And of course bases, but that is less of an issue. Actually, the discussion about base sizes is a bigger topic, than the access to fitting bases. I know 100% accurate would be going with the 25mm bases for everything, and vehicles mostly had none (with the exception of cavalry bases for the bikes - depending on the depiction, and some rare pictures of Dreadnoughts on square bases). Unlike newer editions, where the base size do vary or some other rulesets where base sizes have a range, this is a topic that is untouched in the rule set of 40k's 2nd edition.
At the moment, I’m leaning toward:

• 25mm round bases for most infantry
• 32mm round bases for Terminators and larger characters
• 80mm round bases for Land Speeders and Dreadnoughts
• 70×25mm bike bases (essentially cavalry bases adapted to fit round base aesthetics)

That said, bikes stand perfectly fine on their own, so I may leave them unbased. One thing that I am absolutely sure about is, no square bases in 40k.

We got the models, we got the accessories, two more things missing - rules and paints.

For Space Marines in 2nd edition, there were three Codex options:

• Codex: Ultramarines (representing Codex-compliant chapters)
• Codex: Angels of Death (Blood Angels and Dark Angels)
• Codex: Space Wolves (with a very different army structure)

While Rogal Dorn certainly saw things differently from Roboute Guilliman, he is loyal to the Emperor and thus making the Codex Ultramarines the most reasonable choice. Would covering the Codex Ultramarines in a review be something you'd be interested in?

There is a fan project for a 2nd edition Imperial Fists Codex, but I don't feel the need for that and will simply use the regular Codex Ultramarines army list for this project. As well as NewRecruit (an online army tool) to build my army.

Army construction in 2nd edition was fairly straightforward. Units were divided into three categories:

• Characters (covering all kinds of heroes and command staff of your army list)
• Squads (all kind of units, including elite veterans)
• Support (usually vehicles and heavier units, as well as allies from other army lists)

Characters and Support units could each make up to 50% of your total points, while Squads had to account for at least 25%, with no upper limit. There were also dependencies: for example, Space Marine armies required a Techmarine if you wanted to field any vehicles, including a Dreadnought.

Heading for 1,250 points I went for the following scope for the Chaosbunker Classics

Characters:

• 1x Space Marine Captain
• 1x Techmarine

Squads:

• 1x Devastator Squad of 10
• 1x Tactical Squad of 10
• 1x Scout Squad of 5

Support:

• 1x Dreadnought

With the addition of a Librarian (another Character) and Whirlwind (Support) to go for 1,500 points. This would be a tally of 28 infantry miniatures, a dreadnought and one vehicle.

Another great addition to this project is the aspect that we have 2026 and it is much easier to get a grasp of a paint scheme, than back in the day. I want to keep them very close to the original box art (first picture), and I don't have to rely on writing the 'Eavy Metal a post card and hoping for them to answer through the Q&A section of the White Dwarf. There is the internet! And there are some great people recreating the Imperial Fists in very era-appropriate ways. For example SpacedCrusader (middle picture with the Terminators) or 413Minis in the third picture.

There are further amazing resources online, MiniScape / MneilPainter, for example who painted an Imperial Fists army as well and kept it in a approachable way with simple techniques.

So far I got myself a few cans of white primer, along with Titans Hobby Imperial Yellow Matt Primer and Cassandora Yellow, as I want to go for a warmer tone, fitting the 2nd edition paint jobs. A lot of the tutorials for Imperial Fists either cover the "colder" looks of 30k Imperial Fists or very intense yellow of the newer studio paint jobs of the Primaris Space Marines.

First step will be to get the 28 miniatures mentioned above based and partially glued, along with a paint tester to see, what fits and where I need to tweak my recipe.

Beyond that, what do I need still to take care of? Decals isn't that big of an issue, at least not for the chapter badge of the Imperial Fists, as I have mostly sculpted shoulder pads (of which some I'll have to green stuff case, to put the iconography on fixed left shoulder pads and additional terminator pads) as well as banners, as the Imperial Fists were none of big four. But both of these are areas where I can get create and do some hobby.