Converting Arachnarok into a Tervigon: Part 1 (Project Dryder)

 Old School here and through the wonders of time-travel, DFG has possession of an Arachnarok (the huge spider from Fantasy) and I am hard at work turning this beauty into a Tervigon! I have literally just begun the process and have taken some photos of the actual Arachnarok sprue and have some questions for the readers to help guide me in this process.

Let's start with the sprue. The sprue is awesome as the entire spider comes on a seperate sprue from all of the little goblins and their platform (those bits are awesome too, though). What this means for the potential converter is that online bits traders will likely sell sprues complete for less than the cost of the actual kit. The kit itself is great. Following much of their recent work, GW has produced the sprue in such a way that the mold lines are minimal and hidden or completely non-existant (much like the blood crusher kit).

For the Tyranid converter, there are a number of conector peices for the legs that, when assembled seperate from the legs, make four chimney peices (two larger, two smaller) for the Tervigon's back abdomen. I will show those off in part 2.

Of course the highlighty of the whole sprue is the abdomen ...

 ... the abdomen is seriously huge, which is good as we want our mamma bug to have a big ol' booty! Here are a couple comparison shots:

Alright, so it is huge, but it happens to be just about the right size to pair up with the Carnifex torso. My conversion idea is to make this Tervigon in the aspect of a Dryder (basically a centuar-spider) and I have two ideas that I am looking at, but I am having a little trouble making up my mind: On one hand, I am leaning very heavily toward the Upside down carnifex torso as I like how it takes away from the "converted carnifex" look and the torso meets up with the spider's body perfectly!

On the other hand, I could go with a more common tyranid look and go with the forward leaning bug below - I just don't think it will look as cool as the first idea once executed. What do you all think?

All in all, I am super exited to be on the forward edge of making this conversion and can't wait to see it made whole and painted. Rest assured that I am planning to convert the abdomen so that the spiders are not visible or that they are replaced. Also, the extra leg joins will be covered properly and Tyranid "chimneys" will be added to the spider half of the model. I am going to convert and magnetise a set of arms that will be ready so the Terv can be armed with any of it's arm biomorphs. Also, during the painting process, I will use sand medium to add texture to the carnifex half of the model to mirror the texture on the spider.

Any and all feedback is welcome, so hit me up!