I Added Hands to Tau Crisis Suits
After a few years break I started to get back into painting Warhammer 40,000. To put this into context, I am in my early 40s. Being an 80s kid, I was constantly in my local comic book shop. If it wasn’t Star Wars the Customizable Card Game, it was Magic the Gathering or something else. Every time I was in the shop there would always be the vibrantly colored Warhammer models which even for their time were very expensive. It was something I was always interested in, but never really had the chance to get into.
Around 2001, I finally took the plunge and went halfsies with a friend on the 3rd Edition Space Marine vs. Eldar Box Set. Over the years I have been painting miniature off and on bouncing between Space Marines, D&D Miniatures, and the Tau which were coincidentally released right around the time I started collecting. I have what I would consider to be a fairly sizable Space Marine army, although very dated by today’s standards, which I may retroactively share one of these days. I also started an older Tau army probably around 2008 which never really went anywhere. Right around the end of Covid, I decided to give 40K and the Tau another try.
For those that don’t know, from a game lore standpoint, Tau are fairly small in stature. To make up for their size deficiency, Tau often ride around in mechanized suits of varying sizes. The standard all-purpose suit is called a Crisis Suit. Technically, the suit does have hands. However, they are modeled as retracted into the miniature’s forearms like a little mitten. I wanted my models to have prominent hands visible. Unfortunately, the only “official” hands for these models come in the Tau Commander kit which is significantly larger than a Crisis Suit. Using these hands make Crisis Suits look like they have gorilla arms. They are just not scaled right for these kits. Similarly, all third party bits that I know of are of the same scale. To solve this, I did what any normal person would do, I modeled my own hands!
I don’t really have any “in progress” pictures of the modeling, but I will attempt to describe my thought process. The hands extend from a recess in the suit’s forearm. The thing that makes the Commander’s hand not really work on Crisis Suits is that they are not only too big, but they stick out from the forearm way too far. In my version I modeled the hands much smaller than the Commander’s hands; they are about 65% the size. I also wanted them to be under the cover of the arm to make them look more protected and keep the stubby look of the stock Crisis Suit. To accomplish this I realized that I wouldn’t be able to just model some add-on hands, I instead had to model a whole new arm with a cut out for the hand’s thumb. Additionally, stock Crisis Suit arms are a single piece. To accommodate the various poses, I decided to model the arm in two pieces with a joint at the elbow, similar to the Commander kit. Currently I settled on 5 different hand poses which seemed common to many miniatures. I went with “First”, “Relaxed Hand”, “Fingers Extended”, “Point”, and “Claw”.
Here you can see the real scale difference between the stock Tau Commander hand and my custom Crisis Suit arm. Notice how the hand is much further back into the forearm to maintain the overall silhouette of the model and is scaled to the much smaller Crisis Suit which is nearly half the size of the Commander.
These are the finished models. They are similar to the ones I posed above. I did have to make some very minor tweaks to the scaling when I tried to use them on a real Crisis Suit kit. Particularly in regard to the depth of the Shoulder socket and the width of the shoulder which needed to accommodate an optional shoulder pad. You may also notice there are two different shoulders in the above pictures. The stock Crisis Suits have a few shoulders with a notch cut out of the top. This allows them to be installed in an outstretched “T-pose” like posture. I made a shoulder to accommodate this posing option as well.
Lastly, below are some glamour shoulder of my completed arms painted up on my models. The arms in these pictures are also a little different from all the ones posted above. This is because they were all modified to accommodate a 1/16” x 1/16” neodymium magnet. This allows the suits to be fully magnetized to swap to different loadouts depending on gameplay.
I really hope to one day be able to share these parts with the community. I have never sold anything before and I am extremely hesitant to share .stl files. I would hate to see these end up in some reseller’s online store.
I am open to suggestions about how to get this out to the public also suggestions about future projects.
As always, thanks for looking!
