Tuesday 23 September 2014

On the Workbench - Bolt Action Weapon Teams

Having got the Bolt Action bug quite hard now, I've started in on the Desert Rats I reviewed way back when. A few people who have seen them commented on the way I do the weapon team bases so I thought I'd share (given that I'd bought a machine gun to back them up).


They don't look like much there I know, the bit people have liked is the split in the base to allow the teams to be removed as individual casualties. It is a simple idea, but one that allows you to have a nicely modelled mini-diorama that suits these teams while still permitting casualties without tiresome tokens littering the table. Like I say, simple idea but I've come up with a fairly foolproof way of doing this though so share I shall.


Having completed all the cleanup and basic assembly I dry fit the models together on the base to get the distribution right. You can't just chop the thing clean down the middle as they won't be pleasingly centred. Once happy, I picked off the loader and used a strip of masking tape (self adhesive straight edge see) to mark where I needed the cut.


There's no reason that you can't break out a nice sharp scalpel and a steel ruler but as I've got one of those brilliant Chopper II contraptions, it seemed rude not to. Handily with the way the chopper works all I had to do was line up the masking tape with the centre-line, chop half way, flip it round and do the other. Perfect cut. 10 Seconds.


Next, take that handy tape, unstick it from the top and use it to join the two halves from underneath. This stops the base from jiffling around while you glue on the figures.


In this case, the easiest way was dry fit everyone back on the base, glue the loader, then the firer (is that a word?). I left the gun unglued for now as it would only get in the way while painting.


And there you have it. Easy but useful. Better aesthetics, cleaner gaming. Win all round as far as I'm concerned. No reason you can't do this with the Imperial Guard (astra whatever) weapons teams too. I'll obviously post pictures once painted. One last tip. Tape the bases back together when you get to texturing, makes sure you don't get a gap in the texture that would show up the cut. Makes it all the more "as if by magic" when you separate them.

More soon!

TTFN

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