I haven’t played Warmachine in years, but I did some great painting and converting back when I played that game – in my own humble opinion of course! Now, out of the blue some one contacted me through the blog about one of my old Khador conversions:

My magnetised Khador Devestator/Demolisher clamjack.

I had posted up images of the completed conversion (Devestator Demolisher), and the finished painted jack, but never got round to writing up how it was converted. This was actually converted back in June 2014, about 2 months after my son was born. Time has been at premium ever since lol. However, I think I did intend to write it up, as I have some work in progress images. So what follows is less a ‘how to guide’and more of a rambling trip down memory lane.

I do remember playing around a lot with how these clamjack arms could work trying to best judge at what height they would need to be to allow things to work and at the same time not look stupid. The model has an arm extension piece that goes between the shoulder and the arm itself. This is intended to be used when you are posing the jack with the arms ‘open’, and it is not to be used to pose the jack with the arms ‘closed’. The reason for this is that with the arms open the extensions allow the shoulder plates (which are attached to the arms) to drop down exposing the weapons.

I used magnets to hold the arms on to the shoulders, but I used a stack of magnets that allowed me to dry fit the model and the distance between the arm and the shoulder. This was too make my own extension that allowed the arms to be at the height I wanted in both open and closed position.

One thing  I noticed when I was dry fitting the parts was that although the arms were held up no problem with the magnets, they did easily rotate. So to keep the arms in the closed position, I decided to place some magnets in the edges of the arms’ armour plates to act like a magnetic catch on a door.

The shoulder armour needed to be hinged to allow it to open and close over the shoulder weapons. I did this with a section of brass rod and two short sections of plastic tubing. First step was to drill through the attachment tab to the shoulder plate.

Then cut away the inside of the armour plate where the plastic tube needs to sit to line up with the brass rod. This did take a lot of careful shaving and dry fitting to get the hinge to work as intended.

The shoulder plate’s hinge from a number of angles.

Now speaking about the shoulder weapons. The grenades were placed in position and a pilot hole drilled right through into the jack’s hull. The holes were then drilled out to size and magnets added.

The Devastator’s grenades were simple. The Demolisher’s cannons were a bit more involved. The cannon’s rails were drilled to match the grenade launcher, being careful not to breakthrough onto the top side too much if at all. Then the cannon supports were carefully drilled out. The magnet polarity is really important to get right here. As you have the magnet in the shoulder, the magnet in the rail, and the magnet in the cannon support which all need to be orientated correctly. I also added a magnet under the rail at the back so the cannon can be moved backward to allow the shoulder armour to fully close. Although I think magnetising the cannons is really a personal preference thing.

I think that is about it, I did magnetise the head armour plate too, but there is no pictures for that.

I hope that answers your question David, its the best I think I can do. Thanks for getting in touch, if you have any other questions email me back or comment below, and I’ll see if I can answer them.