Hello,

I‘ve got my hands on a unit of Vanari Dawnriders which I intended to convert. Wait, past tense? More about that later.

 The Vanari Dawnrider Kit consists of three Sprues holding 5 Knights and Horses.

The Assembly is pretty straight forward as every Knight consists of 14 parts (2 Horse halves, each consisting of the Armour and the legs, the Horse Head, Front and back of the Knight‘s Torso, Front and back of the Head, two legs, two arms, one holding the reigns and one holding the weapon and the shield.)

The kit is easily assembled, while the biggest hassle is the removal of mold-lines which are surprisingly thick (at least on my sprues) 

Some Tipps while assembling:

prepare all 5 horse parts, then try to glue the horse in one go (legs to Armour parts, head inbetween and then glue and press the two halves together), this will make sure that your model won‘t have a gap running along the middle

Btw: All horse parts are labeled so you know in an instant which parts belong together (most rider parts are also labeled)

Also be cautious while clipping and handling the reigns. *snap*

Oh well. At least it‘s mostly easy to fix if a reign breaks since these are attached to the horse’s head.

Moving on. 
Instead of glueing the torso to the saddle I only glued the legs to the torso (in theory this enables me to remove the whole rider when it comes to painting)

so push the rider to the horse and only glue the legs onto the torso-leg-stumps 

For the Shield and the head I‘d advise to use some non-hardening putty (in Germany it is called patafix) to temporarily attach said parts. This makes painting easier.

Conversion time!

I planned to use the Vanari as Cities of Sigmar Drakespawn Knights (I really have a longing for ordinary Knights! Why did the Lady betray Bretonnia!?)

I tried to put some Incubi Heads onto the Vanari Dawnriders but...

... these are way too big. This was surprising  since all 40K and AoS Aelf/Elf kits had the same propositions and used to be cross-compatible (works just fine with Idoneth, Sisters of the Watch etc.). Even after trimming the sphere-neck-part of the Incubi Head it looked like a bubble-head. So I examined the differences a bit further and realized that the Dawnriders had overal slightly different proportions (thinner arms, less broad Torso etc).

For further comparisons I took some pictures

So I switched back to the standard heads and decided to paint them alike to my other Knights instead of converting (the white head is from Eltharion and that one is also too big, which isn‘t too bad since the helmet hides this rather well).

Final thoughts:

The kit is not for beginners: It consists of too many easily breakable parts and mold-lines running along these parts. Yet the kit is a great joy to assemble (though said mold-lines are quite annoying at times and produce a lot of waste - just look at the table on the pictures above xD)

There are also some bits left:

Ratings 0-10:

Details: 10

Easy to build (amount of parts, naming of parts and fitting of parts) : 8

Placement of mold-lines: 4

Convertibility: 2

Poses: 9 

overall a great and fun Box with really cool and dynamic looking Knights! I bought mine for 38€ on eBay (Second hand). My estimated retail value (which feels fair) for this box  would be 32,5-35€. But let‘s be realistic, GW will charge 45€ for these...😵 which is too much imo so I‘ll skip the final box once it is released 

Some final images

They also looked pretty nice (unpainted) in my Mixed CoS Army as Drakespawn Knights alongside actual Drakespawn Knights.

All of this was written on my Smartphone, my fingers need a break 🤣.

Tell me what you think!