Some time ago I bought a box of five 1:100 (15mm) plastic kit Panthers from PSC Battlefront. They included alternate hull and gun pieces to make Jagdpanthers, if the modeller so chose.
Realistically, getting three Panthers and two Jagdpanthers out of the box would probably have been sufficient for 99% of my wargaming needs, but being the cheap and stingy person that I am, I decided that I wanted to get maximum flexibility from the set.
So, through the magic of magnetism, I made the two options interchangeable on the basic running gear. I used epoxy to set the magnets in place because of both its strength and its gap-filling properties.
The bottom magnets were straightforward enough to place, but to get accurate registration and polarity for the upper magnets, I placed the two sets of magnets together with a piece of cling-film between them, put a liberal blob of epoxy in about the right spot on the inside of the upper hull, and closed it up and let the epoxy drool down and around the upper magnets.
I numbered each set so that the matching magnets always go together.
I will have to make sure that the camo pattern at the front edge of the hulls match, more or less, when I paint them up, but that's not really a big deal.
Just as an aside, I also glued a slug of lead in the hull bottom to give the plastic model a bit of heft. It makes it feel more satisfying in the hand, but it does have the disadvantage that the increased mass means that if I drop it on a hard surface it's more likely to smash into a bajillion pieces.
I think this might be a Battlefront kit, rather than a PSC one. The PSC Panther kit only makes various models of Panthers.
ReplyDeleteThat could well be the case; it was quite a while ago now, and the box is long gone.
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