WIP Tactical Marines and Sternguard Veterans

So I happened to find a great deal online on DBA (danish equivalent to Ebay) for a bunch of second hand space marines and decided to go for it! Mainly to get another unit of Tactical Marines, but also to try and make my own Sternguard Veterans. This was before the new plastic models were announced and the finecast models were just way overpriced imo. Plus it would be fun to build my own models more or less from scratch :D

So this is what I got. It's something like 50 marines with various weapons, plus a few terminators and a captain. Quite a few seems to have been either Dark or Blood Angles models while the rest are just regular marine models.

As seen above most are painted a ghastly yellow (and not very nicely at that), so I decided to start by stripping them ALL of paint. After reading around the net a bit I decided to go for stripping in pure alcohol (96% ethanol) and using ultrasound and a toothbrush :) First a tester however to make sure the model itself wasn't damaged:

Test worked fine, so I went on to batch-stripping. Some of those models really had a ton of paint on em, just look at the "after" picture below :P

A shot of a few models before and after stripping for comparison. All paint went off extremely nicely, although it did leave the plastic surface slightly frosted on some models. Once painted again though, the texture disappears.

And finally I had most of the models stripped clean and back to their wonderful dull grey colour :)

I then selected 7 models to be converted into Sternguard Veterans as well as 7 normal tactical marines, along with a handful to be modified with special and heavy weapons. Furthermore, the box contained enough sergeants to make a few with different loadouts (chainsaws, power-sword and even a powerfist)

I then went ahead and spent around 50 euro on Megabitzshop on heavy and special weapons, scopes, insignia's, arms, bolters, purity seals and all sorts of other bling... This was both to pimp my Sternguard Veterans, but also build them some combi-weapons as well as give me a wide variety of weapon loadouts for my Tactical Marines... Then I set to work! :D

Bits for making a combi-melta. Sniper scope, normal bolter, magazine from terminator stormbolter and nozzle and fuel-tank from a regular Melta.

After weeks and weeks of on-and-off-building it was finally time to spraypaint all my little blue men with a coat of Chaos Black :)

The result is 7 regular marines with bolters:

One with multi-melta, one plasma-cannon, one flamer, one missile launcher and one heavy bolter:

And finally 3 sergeants, one with powersword, one chainsword and one powerfist (I have later added another two with chainsaws):

Now it's back to the trusted paint-scheme to get these fine marines turned into some awesome looking Ultramarines! :D

The finished Veterans I sadly forgot to take pictures of before I started painting, but I'm currently working on them so there will be pictures of the final models very soon :D Until then I can certainly recommend buying models second hand and "reset" them to paint them according to your own theme... You miss out on building them, creating fun/cool poses, but at least you save a bunch of cash :D