So here is a Pre-Heresy Terminator armed with Lightning Claws (of the Alpha Legion). The claws took a while to get right, my first attempt made them with the fingers too long so I removed a few joints from the lightning claws to shorten them. The rest of the model followed my standard method of construction, although I have to admit the shoulder pads were tricky.

At first I attempted them in plasticard but wasn’t happy with the result and so fell back on GS simply because I’m more confident with it. The claws were originally going to be used as masters to have cast, but I’m making another set for that purpose (more fitting for regular scale models). You’ll find a Mini-Tutorial on sculpting Alpha Legion icons here.

To do this I chopped up an original claw, separating all the fingers and thumb and rebuilding the palm attaching the fingers again in reverse of their original order.

I was a big fan of this claw when I first saw it on the Forgeworld website as I don’t really like any of the other existing lightning claws but I have to admit they aren’t really as cool looking as they could be. At some point I’m going to make my own lightning claws based on Horus’ claw in the art of FFG Horus Heresy boardgame. EDIT: Now this is what I call a claw!

Rather than convert all the arms from terminator arms it seemed far more logical to convert and scale up the existing power armour arms, if nothing else than to make the posing a lot simpler. Most of the arms were cut in half at the elbow and straightened, and then plasticard spacers were used to lengthen the forearm too. I then bulked up the forearm and added new elbow pads that cover the cuts and spacers I had made. You can find a Mini-Tutorial on this method here. Additionally you can see how I made the scaled up (widened rather) Jump Packs here.