Haven't had much time to work on Varangian, or any other models lately (nice weather and a large piece of land) but I have managed some progress small progress here and there. I am currently a bit unfocused and are working on several projects in parallel which is not helping. The release of the knight codes and associated models have my brain working overdrive with conversion ideas which is definitively not helping me stay on target.
Be that as it may, I have finally gotten over on major design hurdle on the Varangian, how to attach the arm weapons. I have seen some different designs on different fora but nothing that got struck me as how wanted it done. Since the weapons are quite heavy and if I am posing the arms at some stress position this will put a lot of forces on the joints. One thing I liked from my excursions on the internet was to reinforce the resin with a metal tube to take the forces from the screws or pins if using this attachment method. However, I could not find any suitable tubing for a reasonable price. The closes I got was breaklines but these were only sold in 5m lengths and up. In the end I found what I think is a neat solution, some bushings with a 4 mm clearbore that probably was not intended for this use but thy fit perfectly and will help protect the resin edges from shipping or cracking. The pins were made from M4 threaded pin that was cut to length with some endcap nuts. By tightening the nuts I squeeze the weapon lip in the arm braze so that I can set the angle of the weapon relative to the arm. I hope this will hold up. Anyway, it is a relief to have decided on this so that I can move forward with painting of the upper arms.
Apart from this I also had what I think was a small epiphany the other night. I have not been really happy with the rear platform and especially the railing. The scale has been of somehow. So I thought that if I ad some guards to hold the platform from boarders it might give it a bit more life and a feeling for scale. I remembered that in the baneblade kit there were some commander bodies standing in a non moving pose and that there were some belt feed heavy stubbers for shooting over the sides of one of the baneblade builds. So I thought that a combination of the commanders, some skitarii helmets and heavy stubbers would look cool on the back platform. However, the railing was to high to get the guns over in practical way so I decided to cut of the top rail and shorten the "legs" a bit to get it more in line with a waist high railing for a human soldier. And by just doing this, suddenly the platform did not look so off as before, adding the gunners then was just topping on the cake. I must say that I am really happy with how it turned out.
Not much painting, or much building but at least I have made some design decisions that will help me move forward, and as it is holiday time I will have some more time to sink into this.
