Kitbashing and Conversions: A Beginner's Guide to Making Your 40K Army Unique

By Carter Estes  ·  August 17, 2026

Here is a truth most people discover about three armies deep into this hobby: the model straight out of the box is a suggestion, not a sentence. Games Workshop gives you a starting point. What you do after the sprue is where the army actually becomes yours. That's kitbashing — and if you've been eyeing those jaw-dropping conversions online and quietly telling yourself they're beyond you, I'm here to tell you they aren't. I believe kitbashing is the single most rewarding skill a new hobbyist can pick up, and it's a lot less intimidating than it looks.

What Kitbashing Actually Is

Kitbashing — sometimes called converting — is simply combining parts from more than one kit (or bits box, or paperclip, or plastic tube) to make something that doesn't exist in any single box. A squad champion with a trophy rack built from spare blades. A warlord posed mid-stride instead of standing at attention like he's waiting for the bus. A Rhino with a battle-scarred hull that tells a story. None of that comes in the instructions. All of it comes from you.

And no — you do not need to be a master painter or a professional sculptor to start. You need a hobby knife, plastic glue, a few kits, and the willingness to make one bad cut and learn from it. That's the whole barrier to entry.

Start With a Plan (This Is the Part People Skip)

The difference between a conversion that looks intentional and one that looks like a bits-box accident is planning. Before you cut a single piece of plastic, answer one question: what am I actually trying to say with this model? A veteran sergeant who's seen too many wars? A chaos champion mid-corruption? Sketch it — even a bad sketch counts. Then go hunting for reference. Pinterest, the r/Warhammer and r/minipainting communities, and Instagram are overflowing with conversion work, and studying what other people did is not cheating. It's how everyone learns.

Dry-fit everything before glue touches plastic. Hold the parts together, look at the silhouette, put it down, walk away, come back. If it still reads right an hour later, you're onto something.

The Techniques That Matter Most

Clean cuts. A sharp blade is safer than a dull one — a dull blade slips, and a slip is how you meet the emergency room. Cut away from your fingers, take thin slices rather than one heroic chop, and clean up mold lines while you're in there.

Pinning. This is the technique that separates conversions that survive shipping to a tournament from the ones that shed an arm every time you breathe on them. If you're attaching something heavy — a power fist, an outstretched weapon, a metal wing — drill a small hole into both mating surfaces with a pin vise, drop in a cut length of paperclip with a dab of super glue, and join the two. That little steel rod does more for durability than any amount of glue alone.

Green stuff. Two-part epoxy putty fills the gaps your conversion inevitably creates, smooths transitions between mismatched parts, and — once you're comfortable — lets you sculpt cloaks, cabling, and battle damage from scratch. Start by using it as gap filler. Sculpting comes later, and it comes faster than you'd think.

Let paint finish the job. A conversion isn't done when the glue dries. Paint is what ties disparate bits into one cohesive model — a unified color scheme makes a Frankenstein assembly of six different kits read as a single, purposeful mini.

A Word on Tournaments

With 11th Edition now on tables, plenty of new players are converting their first competitive lists — and there's a right way to do it. The golden rule is WYSIWYG: what you see is what you get. If your model carries a plasma gun on the datasheet, the model should visibly carry something a reasonable person reads as a plasma gun. Convert with passion, but never in a way that gives you a sneaky advantage — an ambiguous weapon or a deliberately hard-to-see wargear loadout is bad form, and any good tournament organizer will tell you the same. Talk to your TO ahead of time if you're unsure. Most of them love a well-made conversion and will happily give you a thumbs-up in advance.

Just Cut Something

Here's my honest advice, Texas-plain: your first conversion will not be your best one, so stop waiting for it to be. Grab a cheap troop model, swap a head, reposition an arm, and glue it together. That's a conversion. You did it. The next one will be better, and the one after that better still — that's how every kitbasher you admire got where they are.

The Game Station carries the plastic kits, hobby knives, pin vises, green stuff, and glue you need to get started — and if you get stuck, come talk to us. We convert models here every week and we're always glad to point a new hobbyist in the right direction. Your army should look like nobody else's. Let's build it that way.