watchya terrans
i've had a request from a crazy man to share my experience in the area of truescaling space marines. so for those of you who've been asleep for the last year or so, truescaling is the act of making a marine look bigger than a standard guardsman. the basic models can look each other in the eye, which is a bit wrong when a marine is
supposed to tower over the common man. but how is it done? listen close...
what you'll need: some plasticard sheet used for spacers. i use 1mm and 1.5 thickness (also known as 0.40 and 0.60). if you want them to really loom over everything else on a standard base you could use 1.5mm and 2mm (0.60 and 0.80).
a sharp knife and a bucket load of "careful"
modelling files plastic glue. since the spacers are gonna be made out of plasticard this is the only glue you'll need green stuff and a sculpting tool the GW sculpting tool is perfect. if you can get your hands on a little rubber headed clay shaper as well so much the better, but it's not essential.
clippers GW sprue clippers are fine.
some marines to beef up 
don't clean up the mould lines on the legs. if the mould lines aren't very prominent then score a straight line from top to bottom down the side of each section of the legs (thigh and shin) with your knife. the reason will become clear later
the basic process
so we wanna make our marines taller, and the best place to do this is in the legs. so the first thing that needs to be done is to cut the legs, half way down the thigh and half way down the shin, so that we can insert some plasticard, like this...
looks simple, right? but you gotta get the cuts just right. in my first attempts i cut the legs parellel to the ground, and wound up with this...
not pretty
so the best bet is to cut them as close as you can to right angles accross the leg, so that it's as straight and flat as you can make it. once this is done it'll leave a kind of raised edge which needs to be scraped off with your knife or filed down. this'll help when it comes time to cover things up with the GS.
right, plasticard time. cut 2 small squares of the thinner thickness card for the thighs and trim them to size with the clippers. the spacers needs to be just slightly smaller than the pieces of leg that it's joining. the more precise you are at this stage the less work you'll need to put in with the GS (you'll notice i wasn't that precise in the pic above, which i payed for when the green stuff went on!). stick these to the stumps above the knee section.
(pic pending)
now do the same thing using the thicker guage card for the shin. you'll notice that the 2 halves of the shin are different sizes. i suggest you work to the larger of the 2, the lower section with the feet attached, and then trim the spacer at an angle to match the smaller surface near the knees. once these spacers are shaped stick them to the stumps below the knee section.
(pic pending)
now that the spacers are in place it's time to stick all the pieces back together. remember that line we scored down each section of the legs? that is you guide line. match up the line on each half of the leg and you'll end up with the same pose you started with, only bigger!
i generally tend to stick everything together at the same time to make any minor corrections that much easier. do a dry run using blu-tac just so you know what's what and then glue each bit one at a time, keeping the blu-tac on the other bits so you can judge your progress. glue to feet to the base and make sure the seperate bits line up properly.
congratulations! you are now about half way through the process
time for a size comparison...
ignoring the upper body, note where the knees and belt are in comparison to the other marine.
okey doke, time for some fun with green stuff! if you got the spacers the right size you can skip this paragraph, but if there's too deep a gap in the extended areas you'll need to fill it a bit before moving on. roll out a thin sausage of putty and push it into the gap, smooth it down and ideally wait for it to dry. the idea is to get the gap at the same level relative to the plastic either side of it, so that when you smooth out the reast of the area there's no bumps and dips.
now start adding GS to the legs one section at a time. wrap a sausage of GS around the leg and with a wet sculpting tool (i find that saliva, while a little gross, is the cheapest most effective lube for GS) push the putty upto the edges of the armour plates. if you run out of putty add a bit more and if you use too much just scrape some off. try to get it as thin as you can, especially at the edges. if you have a clay shaper now's the time to use it. if not you'll have to make do with the sculpting tool. smooth out all the imperfections in the GS you've just applied and if you're feeling fancy you can add the gubbinzy bits that appear on power armour. you know what i mean.
i only tend to work on one section of one leg at a time when doing this, ie. one thigh let it cure, the other thigh let it cure, a shin let it cure and the other shin let it cure. if i try to do more than that in one go i usually end up with finger prints all over the place but i you think you can be more careful than me you could do both thighs at once and then both shins at once, or al of it together. it all depends on how quick you want to be. once everything has had a day or 2 to fully cure run a file or some fine grade sand paper over the legs to buff out any lasting imperfections and you're done!
hopefully you now have a pair of legs that look something like these..
complete with gubbinzy bits
if you have a lot of these to do (i'm looking at you crazyman!) it's a good idea to work on 4 or 5 at a time. you'll have to be a bit organised, making sure that each set of legs is kept seperate and that you know which bits are for right legs and which for left (maybe labling them would be a good idea, wish i'd thought of that before now. could have saved myself a lot of pain
). all that's left is to build the torso as you normally do and viola! a truescaled marine!
credit for most of these techniques goes to the prophet of truescale, deadcommando, who's ideas i shamelessly swipped, repackaged and sold as my own