Artscale Space Marine Bike

This is my first Artscale Space Marine Bike (a prototype you could say). The whole thing is about half as long again as a regular bike, hence the need for a custom base (2 x 40mm rounds and a 40mm square). The plastics are a combination of Ork and Space Marine bikes and the exhausts came from a Baneblade or perhaps Shadowsword kit (I’m not too sure).

I gotta admit I’ve never been a big fan of the 40k scale plastic Space Marine bikes. Not sure what it is about them, maybe they’re too “blocky” or something they’ve just never appealed. Now I’m not saying this to blow my own trumpet but I’m genuinely surprised by how much I like this bike conversion. When I started it I had no real idea or plan on how to do it, just a pile of assorted SM and Ork bike bits. It’s come together very nicely. I took the inspiration for the pose from an image of the Cloud character from Final Fantasy 7 (ahh, memories…). If I were to make a squad of these I’m not so sure how they’d look in the usual biker posing (ie: gunning forward), I guess it’s difficult to pose a machine.

I played around for quite a long time on the guns on this. The work in progress had bolters attached either side of the front wheel and it just didn’t seem brutal enough. I started by stripping these off and adding armour plates (bit off a cyclone missile launcher). I then had to figure an alternative to the bolters. I played around with heavy bolters, storm bolters and a plasma cannon, trying to mount them on a mini turret behind the rider, and whilst it looked pretty cool it was just OTT.

I found a couple of stormbolters at the bottom of my bitzbox that I think came from dreadnoughts. After a LOT of filing and trimming I managed to get them to fit nicely on either side of the engine block/radiator.

Here’s a rough breakdown of components used:
Ork Warbiker – front forks, front wheel, radiator, handles
Space Marine Bike – main body, control (handlebar center)
Ork Trukk – back wheel
Baneblade – exhausts
Ven Dread (metal) – stormbolters, behind seat armour plating
Terminator – legs
Power Armour marine – torso, arms, backpack, head
Terminator Cyclone ML – armour on side of front wheel
Sangiunor – power sword

Early pic to help show basic construction. Note, that I put a large spacer between the two halves of the body of the bike to make it suitably bulky. If I were to do more of these in future I’d look for an alternative to the Ork vehicle wheels, potentially making my own if I could’t find a suitable source.