Iron Within, Iron Without

I've had the idea of doing an Iron Warriors army for a while now. At least a couple of years. I've always like the background of Iron Warriors. They are by far my favourite Chaos legion, mostly with the fact that they don't worship the Chaos Gods like the other legions do. They aren't in it for the promises of immortality or anything like that, they are just against the Imperium. They got mistreated back in the day and are just holding a grudge and allying themselves with the other genetically enhanced super-freaks against the Imperium (ie the other Chaos Legions). Also I've always had an interest in the Mechanicium.

Iron Warriors also give many many chances for conversions. Conversions are very fun and I'm getting rather tired of "straight out of the box" units that I am doing with my Tyranids. I want to throw in as many bionics as possible, in every unit. There will be no mutation in my army either. It seems to me that Iron Warriors don't care too much for mutations and warp spawns and the such. I always imagined them getting them but when they do they simply just cut it off and throw on a new bionic to replace it.

For my troops I want to use the specialized units (Plague marines, Thousand Sons, Khorne Bezerkers, etc) mainly. Just that for some reason the thought of using Noise Marines fills me with disgust. Don't know why but it is the truth so they are out. Iron Warriors openly use Bezerkers so there's no problem just using those so that just leaves Plague Marines and Thousand Sons. I like the idea of extra toughness and Feel no Pain through bionics, but also I can see using shield generators and fixed-up bolters. They both cost the same per person except Thousand Sons cannot take special weapons or almost any upgrade while Plague Marines have all the options. This makes Plague Marines, on the whole, more expensive because I have to pack my punch into them if I use them. I want to use them both and basically make one a siege squad and the other a fortification squad though I haven't fully decided which is which yet.

Another conversion I've been thinking about is Obliterators. I hate the mutated models that GW throws at us and got to thinking of using a large gun servitor instead though I'm still trying to think of how I will do those up. Other conversions for the future include a dreadnought on tank tracks, various Defilers, cyborg possessed and chosen, transport that be used as cover when firing (for my troops mostly) which seems cheesy at first but does it not make sense that that is what these little buggers would do? Still unsure about how I will go about doing that but it'll be fun regardless.

I haven't gotten much done on this yet as I am still in the planning stages. Though I have two Defilers (one is just normal that was donated to me and I haven't decided what to do with it yet) but the other cam out quite nicely in my opinion. Here it is primed black (sorry didn't think to take a picture before priming.)And here it is with its metal base coat:


Then I got to working on the Warsmith. This one was more or less a testing model for my modeling skills and will probably be demoted to a squad leader after I get better at this. I wanted a simple guy so but I wanted him to stand out too and this is what became of the two ideas squished together.


Then I threw some paint on the poor fellow but just the base iron because I haven't bought the gold I want yet.



It doesn't look as bronze in real life so it must be the lighting but I will admit I purposely gave it a brass-looking kind of tint which should look better with the gold and yellow.




I'll inform you after some progress so tune in again soon. Thanks for reading.