Making a $10.00 toy plane into a great Ork Fighta

Recently John went to the Battlebunker in L.A. and picked me up a Forgeworld Fighta Bomma. It cost me about 160.00 dollars and it was well worth it. The model is great, has exquisite details, in short a joy to put together and paint. But most of us can only afford one FW model in their lives and I am certainly on of them. So instead, I went to the local hobby store.
I looked around for good, inexpensive planes that I could use for 40K. And what a find I made: a beautifully detailed plastic, painted plane for $10.00 (!). Here's the box (more info at the bottom of this post):

and this is what is looks like, put together. The model is designed for novice modelers and doesn't need glue; I did glue the whole thing though.

I totally like the bi-plane-propellor idea for the Orks and resisted demands from John and my buddy Christian to change it to a turbine engine. Nice stand by the way..the pilot was not included.

After putting it toegether, it was time for the pilot, which was simple. I rotated his hand but struggled with the bomb I wanted him to have in his hand, this was the first one I tried. In the end I used a different one: a Forgeworld Bomb that I looted from my Fighta Bomma. I guess it's the most expensive piece in this model!
Then I put on all the Orky pieces.

rebuilt the tail (my wife said Orks would never have a nice, rounded tail)

and worked on the bottom a bit.

Then added the weapons. This model already comes with a double hull mounted machine gun (perfect right?), so I just had to create the wing mounted one. I had one gun in my bitz box, the other one was made of a couple of straws and some plastic. The bombs were left over from the Robogear conversion

Then the paint job. I wanted to match the colors to the Stompa and the FW Bomma and stuck with the yellow look.

Added a daring grot...

Here's that expensive bomb..

After that it was a smooth ride to the end. The paint job was pretty unsophisticated:
Green primer, Golden Yellow blotting, Sunburst Yellow blotting, Devlan Mud Wash and a final highlight with Sunburst again.





Here's the FW Fighta Bomma next to the remodeled version.

For info on the plane or other ones, go to: Wowtoyz or buy them at Capitola Hobbies Ebay Store
(we don't get a cut by the way, just like shopping locally).

In the end the fun challenge of modeling for Warhammer 40K is going into any store and trying to think outside the box. There are a lot of completely unrelated things for sale that can blend into our world seamlessly. If you keep an open mind, a lot is possible.
Mike