Warhammer 40,000 – Imperial Fists Call to Arms Pt 7

The next thing I painted for my Imperial Fists was the Dreadnought, the heavy armour in my small force that supports the Space Marine units.

The old Dreadnoughts were chunky blocks of pewter and certainly a challenge for any hobbyist. You get a full metal kit, and quite often some of the smaller bits are missing, like the auto-launcher or the banner top. Sometimes the banner itself did not survive the 20+ years of service, especially once it was dropped from later edition boxed sets of the metal kit.

I managed to sub-assemble mine and left off the banner for now. I want to replace it with a brass rod, as the original metal banner pole is too soft for its size and tends to bend or break.

I assembled the pieces, cleaned up what I could, and unfortunately noticed some damage in the cast that I will have to turn into battle damage. I primed it white first and then added another coat of Imperial Yellow by Titan Hobby. Spoiler alert: do not do it that way. Unless you own an airbrush, prime that hulk of metal black, give it a heavy drybrush of metallic paint afterwards, tape off what you want to keep dark, and then go for the main colour of your Chapter.

Painting all the dark parts in the recesses without spoiling the yellow was certainly time-consuming. And after blocking in the base colours, I ran into my usual problem with this project: how to adapt the contrast colours for the 3rd Company of the Imperial Fists. As you can see, I made a collage from the Angels of Death and Ultramarines codices. I think there is a picture of an Imperial Fists Dreadnought somewhere in the 3rd edition, but I could not find it in the later codex. Most likely it was in a battle report. (Update in White Dwarf #226 from October 1998 includes an Imperial Fists Dreadnought, but I could not find proper pictures.)

We had a lengthy discussion about the Dreadnought’s base (not just mine, but the Chaos Dreadnought as well and so on). In later editions this is not an issue, as you get the 80 mm round base, but in 2nd edition there was a mixture of DIY solutions: some people crammed those models onto 50 mm squares, used the old flat Titan bases, or simply did not use a base at all.

That was not an option for me. Square? No — no squares in this project. The flat Titan base? I could have substituted that with something from Renedra or Warlord, but that would have looked odd alongside the rest of the project. So I went with the 80 mm round base, of which I had some spares from my Titanicus project.

But I kept on painting. I gave the sarcophagus a red trim, which would fit the 3rd Company, and added more paint to the detail pieces, but it still did not work for me. I did not have the time to experiment, and the others just told me to keep going and not waste time overthinking it.

And just when I was not sure which road to take, Spaced Crusader, a fellow Son of Dorn, posted his Dreadnoughts on Instagram and gave me exactly the inspiration I needed. The contrast, the mid-section, a great inspiration!

I prepared the Dreadnought to be battle-ready for Chaosbunker Classics. There is still a lot to do before I can call him truely finished.

It still needs some touch-ups, highlights on the yellow, bone, and metals, and of course decals. I want to add the Fist icon on the left side and the company marking on the right. I have a second Dreadnought in stock, but I am not sure whether I want to go through all of this a second time and if it is even necessary for a 2nd edition project.

Still, I am working on an article, just like I did with the Terminators, to give you an overview of what to look out for if you are looking for one second-hand. I gave a brief insight into the lore of the Castraferrum-pattern Dreadnoughts in some of my other reviews (Brutalis or Ballistus Dreadnought), and the Mk V pattern, which was the design used in 2nd edition, was later produced in plastic in later editions, both as a simplified near-push-fit kit and as a multipart plastic kit.