Can I vent? Boy, do I HATE MOSQUITO GUNS! This is what I meant when I referred to as "deck guns that look like a squashed mosquito - only smaller":
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File comment: Mosquito Gun
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The Borodino kit has these guns mounted on a cone pedestal. White Ensign, perhaps to reflect accurate detail (but I suspect more likely just to be unnecessarily cruel) provides fold-up stands to replace these cones (along with gun shields and shoulder rests.) I scrapped all the Zvezda parts which had the clunky gun shields unfortunately molded on, opting instead to go with the small 1.1s from the Missouri, as I will be replacing THOSE with LionRoar Brass anyway when I eventually get to my Iowas. These were much easer to clip from the cone and to remove the shoulder rest - and the Tamiya molding was a bit finer than the Zvezda casting.
White Ensign provides enough brass to make 20 guns, and the plans of the Borodino call for 18. So we had two spares, which we immediately trashed trying to make the first two guns. So we're out of spares...
The problem is that the bases are shaped like the letter "D" with five spokes on them. They are very small.
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File comment: White Ensign Brass for the Borodino
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Cutting out the spiders is easy enough... Although I broke a leg or two when I was attempting to cut them from the sheet. The legs are EXTREMELY FRAGILE - so I planned to replace the broken ones with .006 brass wire...
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File comment: Notice the sad, four-legged pedestal in the foreground, and the replacement brass wire.
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Two problems happen when attempting to use the pedestals... First, there is really just no good way to get a grip on the buggers to make sure that the legs bend at the appropriate places. And second (and more problematic) is that if you attempt to do any adjustments, straightening, or rebending, the legs just snap off. As in, "we're outta here - sucks to be you!" And, sometimes the legs just snap off for fun anyway, like when you are cutting them from the sheet, or when you just think about doing the most careful of initial bends. GRRRR...
So I devised a plan to make things a little more manageable by forming a solid base that could be used as grip and foundation for gluing broken legs. I started by punching out some styrene disks, then cutting away one side to make appropriately sized "D's"...
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File comment: Making the letter "D" to lock down my mosquito guns...
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Next step, glue the spiders down. Note that I am working on a strip of Scotch Tape sticky-side up, and that is stuck to a scrap of my deck material just to provide som stiffness...
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File comment: Brass glued to disks
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Next step, simply (Hah!) bend the legs up. And watch out for the legs that had some glue runoff and stuck themselves to the tape... Then place a trop of glue at the top to lock all the legs together.
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File comment: Pedestals with bent legs and glue blobs
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When you are done, assuming that you have not been sent to an asylum or commited some unspeakable act on your pet out of frustration, you have a piece of tape with some pedestals stuck to it. The disk bases provide SOMETHING that you can grip without mangling with fine tweezers or a very fine hemostat. I was able to make all the pedestals I needed, and replaced broken legs, to match the two guns that we had previously completed after mangling four sets of legs.
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File comment: I HATE MOSQUITO GUNS
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The bad news is that one of those two guns separated from the pedestal, so I had to attempt to reglue it several times to get it to stick. And, in so doing, I had an accumulation of glue from the failed attempts forming a solid blob within the legs. In other words, a cone. Like the ones I had cut off. Except bigger, and more blobby. So I just reglued the cast cone to the base.
So, ONE of my 18 guns has a cone pedestal. Too bad. I'll bury it in an obscure location, and use the disk-based guns everywhere else, unless I mangle more of those. (And if anybody says, "Yeah -but the stands didn't have a solid base" I can only threaten to throw a mosquito gun at you with all my strength...)
If I had it to do all over again, I would just leave them all on their wonderfully cast cone bases and leave it at that. Sometimes you just have to admit defeat.
Have I mentioned that I HATE Mosquito Guns?
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File comment: ???
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