Hello!
I'm in that rather unenviable position of waiting for some kits to arrive (it'll be a long while yet, I'm quite remote) and trying to plan just what to do with them without seeing the sprues in person is a little frustrating. So I thought I'd reach out here not just for general conversion advice, but also to see if I might be lucky enough to find someone with some experience with the kits in question.
A bit of brief background: I'm building the core of my army around GW's latest Ironbreakers/Irondrakes and Longbeards/hammers kits which (considering I want to build 30, 20, 30 and 30 of each unit) are looking pricier than a gromril anvil. I need to find a way to save some money and, in light of Avatars of War's recent 25% sale, I got ordered some Kings Guard. Since I'm building my Hammerers entirely from the GW models, I will have a ton of Great Weapons and other Longbeards bitz by the bucketful. I'd have preferred to buy Ironshields but they shan't be available for a long while.
So here's what's stumping me: I have no idea what the Kings Guard sprue looks like. As far as I know, it's a plastic kit now (converted over from resin) but I don't know which parts are loose; are the arms, heads, etc separate on the sprue or do bodies come as a single cast?
This is somewhat important because I want to make two changes: first - the beards are much too short on the default heads, so I'd like to try for a head swap with the plastic Longbeards heads I'll have, or I'll have to do some greenstuffing. Second, I need to change their armament from hammers to great weapons; will the great weapon arms for Longbeards fit on these models? Can I convert them to get the arms to fit? Or am I going to have to cut the heads off of the hammers and replace them with axeheads?
Any advice would be most appreciated!