The Hydra Flak Gun That Could

This is a hobby "feel good" story.  Don't mind the clown on my ass.

A while back I gave up on Dark Elves (I can't reconcile myself with the spear/repeater bow men) for a pair of Hellhounds.  Somehow I managed to misplace one of the turrets.  It was one of the factors that saw me give up on my last attempt at a guard army.  It seemed every time I'd sat down to work on the models I was compelled to conduct yet another futile search for the errant piece.  Frustration trumped productivity and yet another project got sidelined.

As I warmed to the idea of returning to the guard I hit the same wall but rather than look for the missing part I considered what else I might be able to do with chimera hull.  I had a look through the armour parts box and came up with an Aegis auto cannon set from a long forgotton armoured car build I'd done and a Baneblade turret that I'd been gifted when my local shop decided to use GW pre-fab terrain exclusively and no longer wanted a turreted bunker they had kicking around.  I'd already utilized the cannon to beef up a basilisk and a leman russ main gun so the turret itself was looking pretty spartan and I began to wonder how the cannons might look in place of the missing gun.

Small gun?  Quantity is a quality unto itself

 Initially I thought the turret was too large.  I had never played around with a baneblade kit before and thought it was a write-off until I realized the stowage at the rear of the turret was tacked on and could be broken off.  The turret is still sizable but snubbed enough that I'm happy with the result.  I had a piece from a modular water tower kicking around that I added to the top of the turret to represent a sonar dome and found a sensor array (I think it's from a vehicle command sprue) that looked right.  The auto cannons mated up well with a little plasticard and the after taking a spare turret ring from a rhino/razorback kit I was in business.

Flash may not show it well but the lenses got a hit of future wax that makes quite a difference in person

I don't have a concise set of instructions on what I did with the model (although it wasn't a terribly involved conversion).  If there is a lesson to be learned from this post it probably relates to problem-solving and dangers of being inflexible when looking at a hobby problem.  I killed the project because I was unwilling to examine other avenues.  I ruined my hobby by getting aggravated about a single piece of plastic.  Don't let it happen to you.  Few things are as pitiful as a grown man crawling about on his hands and knees rummaging through boxes of toy soldiers muttering to himself.

A happier ending than life in the Junkyard of Shame