The Eldar Phantom Titan: The Base

Greetings, all!
So, after some hiatus, it's back on with the big one- the Eldar Phantom Titan. Now, those amongst you with both eagle-eyes and excellent memories may have spotted the legs of the Phantom assembled in my WIP-shelves photo from my Hatcave (really must think of a better name than that*) announcement last summer. So, I thought I'd better bring you all up to speed with how I got the bottom half of the Phantom built. First, though, there's the base to consider.
A big model like this really needs a base to support it, as the last thing you want is to knock it over with some over-zealous dice-rolling and fracture a delicate part. Big bases are commercially available and the client sourced a suitable one from...errr, somewhere. I really must ask him where he got it from.
Anyhoo, the client asked if the Phantom could be posed standing with one foot on a broken-off Imperial Titan weapon (a Melta Cannon), so the first thing to do was to make the provided broken weapon look right, and position it onto the base.
To start with, I raided the bits box to build a piece that would look like the arm joint had sheared off at a pivot point, exposing wire bundles. I also made a couple of plugs to show where a couple of feeds had been pulled out.

Next up I wanted to make the weapon itself look like it had crashed into the ground after being snapped off the Titan. I figured that something so big and heavy, dropping from fifty metres up would not survive intact, so I wanted to add some heavy damage to it. I cut into the gun barrels and then heated them and bent them (judicious application of the required amount of brute force), as if they'd hit the ground tip-first. Some cuts with a knife and clippers added to the effect of damage.

Then I needed to do some damage to the guard that surrounds the gun barrels. I really had some fun with this, cutting and bending (a hairdryer is really helpful with this sort of thing) and I even broke out the mini-drill to make some scuffs and gouges.

Finally all the pieces were assembled (much forcing and swearing and gluing-together of fingers happened...) and attached to the body of the gun, which had also been heavily seen-to with the clippers, knife and mini-drill.

I then needed to paint the gun before it was attached to the base. I needed to do this as a) the barrels would need to be painted before the guards were fixed in place and it made sense to do the whole thing at once, and b) I wanted to be able to get some painting done, to get a feel for the scale of the thing. 

Finally, the gun needed to be fixed into place on the base. I glued it down, and built up some Milliput around it, along with some broken shards of Eldar architecture that the gun landed on.

So that's that. Now I was ready to begin work on positioning the legs. So far, it had been easy and a lot of fun and there was no reason to think it would be any different from now on...

*At the moment, I've using "Edward Shedward" or "Eddie McSheddie McWoo." My head is often an odd place...Please, someone come up with something better...