Tutorial: Tau Shield Drone Conversion

Considering how useful shield drones are to Tau players, GW don't actually produce many. This is a quick way of knocking together shield drones using parts that should be readily available in Tau bits boxes.

Here are the parts that you'll need: A gun drone sprue, and a shield generator from the Crisis Suit kit. Start by clipping them out and cleaning them up. The pulse carbines aren't required, so toss 'em back in your bits box!

Take the piece that is usually used to mount the guns and carefully trim off the two pegs.

Now cut the tab from the bottom of the shield generator, and file down the bottom of the trimmed down gun mount so that it has a flat bottom and will sit nicely on top of the shield generator.

Glue these two parts together and leave them to dry fully. We need to drill through these two parts before we are finished and if you do it before the glue is dry it will destroy the joint.

All that remains is to drill a whole in the centre of the shield generator for the flight base to slot into, add the antenna, and finally glue the finished shield generator mount into the bottom of the drone.

Here's the finished conversion. It's quick and easy enough that doing several for a list won't be too time consuming, and I do think its worth going to the extra trouble.