Easier Stormtrooper Modifications

Last week I made a write up for my modified Stormtrooper squad leader. This week I want to show off some standard troopers with some easier modifications.

If we were to assign modifications a difficulty level from low, medium and high, I think my squad leader modification from last week just barely squeaks into the medium tier. After the left arm was removed some cutting needed to be done around the left cheek (jowl?) of the helmet. No sculpting was required, but there was some drilling and a piece of brass rod was used as a pin. Let’s see if we can’t make a couple unique poses without these more specialized items.

I really like a kneeling bazooka dude, but not enough that I need a whole bunch of him. Let’s do an arm swap for the kneeling trooper and give the bazooka to someone standing upright.

Like most stormtrooper weapon arms, the bazooka (yes, I know it’s an HH-12, but bazooka is such a fun word) comes with both arms attached. This makes it pretty tough to reposition if we want a different trooper to be firing it. All of the standing troopers are in action poses with their heads either looking to the left or right, or they are running forward and looking slightly down. The kneeling soldier is looking straight ahead and the arms are molded to be shooting straight ahead.

You could cut and sculpt them to make them work with some of the standing models, but that’s more effort than we are aiming for currently. Let’s chop the left arm off at the wrist and save it for later (there are not a lot of spare limbs in these kits, waste not want not), then shave the left hand off the bazooka with a modeling knife.

Now we have a bazooka arm that can be held at any angle. But what to do for a left arm? Well, last week we chopped a left arm off of our squad leader, which I saved (waste not.. yeah, you get it). Let’s glue that to a storm trooper and see what we think.

Not bad! Let’s throw the bazooka arm on at a downward angle and we have a fresh, new pose to break up our otherwise identical legion of stormtroopers. Excellent! Ok, time to get to work on the kneeling guy. This mod was so easy that I did not bother taking pictures. Just use the blaster arms from the storm trooper we just made, cut off the tabs and stick them on. Oh, and chop off the holstered blaster on his hip, if you like. I shaved it off with my knife then gave it a sand with some 1000/4000 grit nail file sponges.

And there are the modified stormtroopers posing for a group photo. Aren’t they handsome?

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