White Dwarf #271 saw the release of the Tau update to the Vehicle Design Rules.  Finally armed with our weapon point costs, Shas'os could finally start breathing life into the mad scientist ideas that had been plaguing their minds.  Given the anime style of the Tau, there was no shortage of inspiration, nor of model kits to transform into Tau machineries of destruction!

Rather than be inspired by some uber-cool Gundam kit lying about, I was instead inspired by an assembled Devilfish kit that I had used to practice my airbrushing skills on (quite pathetically, I might add).

Step 1:

I had an assembled Devilfish from an online trade which was really convenient as I did not have to assemble the hull and engines from scratch.  If you are starting from scratch, make sure that you carefully scrape away all the mold lines and let the glue dry completely first.

Using a jeweler's saw I cut the assembled hull in half, just in front of the side doors.  I then traced the shape of the back of the cockpit piece onto thin plastic card, like the kind used for comic book dividers.  I cut this out and glued it to the back of the cockpit section, and when it was dry carefully trimmed the card to be flush with the model.  This gave me a large flat are to add the engines to, rather than a big hollow area that would make precarious joins.

The back half of the assembled 'fish I saved to use for an interesting crashed Devilfish terrain piece later on.  You can just see the sheet of plastic between the hull and the engines in the photo below:

On to Step 2!