I wanted something big and imposing for this year’s major project for the holidays, something that makes my opponents think twice when we deploy our armies for an apocalypse game. I also wanted a centrepiece for my Dark Angels collection. Since glaives don’t have 40K rules and I’m not a fan of the astraeus, I went for the falchion. With 8 lascannons and a twin volcano cannon which can melt titans, it doesn’t get much more imposing. It is, however, a big project and a tricky build in parts. Here’s how I got on.

The Build

I have reasonable experience with Forge World kits, yet this still took a good 10 hours to build (with plenty of breaks, of course). Although it’s a hybrid kit, there are only a few parts from the baneblade which is uses as a base, so it’s almost all resin. Naturally, that comes with the challenges of working with resin: flash, bent components, brittle material. That said, these were all minor issues with this kit and just needed a bit of patience and know-how.

One tool I highly recommend when working with something this big is a razor saw. Standard hobby clippers will simply not get through the big chunks of resin sprue.

While most of the kit goes together well, the tracks are a challenge. Here’s how they turned out on my first attempt:

Note the misalignment of the second tracks up on both sides. Fixing this was the hardest part of the build and took a mixture of a hobby knife to trim the tracks down to size, and a hairdryer to bend them into shape. This was all about trial and improvement, repeating the process of trimming and bending until they became more or less in line with the rest of the tracks.

There were a few parts that were not included on the instructions, namely the pipes to the exhausts and vents. Fortunately, they are labelled in the parts list, and it’s fairly obvious where they go, if a little tricky to fix them in place when the rest of the tank is built. I used a pair of tweezers and a whole lot of patience to attach them to the back.

Painting

There’s not a lot of reference material to go off when it comes to painting a falchion for 40K (something that many Horus Heresy players would call me a heretic for doing), which means I pretty much made up the scheme as I went along. It’s fairly similar to the Forge World paint job for Imperial Fists which is predominantly yellow (which I swapped for Caliban Green) with some black panels.

I think tanks are where airbrushing really comes into its own. I don’t have one of those so went ahead with my usual recess shading and edge highlighting approach. On reflection, a zenithal primer or pre-shading would likely have given more depth to the overall effect.

I primed the whole thing with Army Painter Angel Green. This stuff is a touch thicker than I’d like in a primer but since Games Workshop no longer sell Caliban Green spray, it’s the best I’ve found and you don’t lose any detail. I then followed with a couple of thin coats of GW Caliban Green over the top using a terrain brush. The rest of the green follows my tutorial on Dark Angels green armour.

The tracks follow a GW Warplock Bronze base coat, washed all over with GW Nuln Oil, and drybrushed with Vallejo Gunmetal Grey. I then used the drybrush to apply some random splashes of Vallejo Gunmetal Grey to the flat of the tracks.

Finishing touches are what sets this model off – it can look a bit plain without them. For these I used both the standard and Forge World Dark Angels transfer sheets. Note that the big reaper transfers on the sides cover the doors, so fitting them well during the build is ideal. They also needed trimming at the bottom because they overhang. That’s just a quick job for the craft knife once they’d dried.

Here’s how it turned out.

That’s all for this one. Feel free to drop a comment with what you think or let me know if you’ve done something similar.

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