Magnetized and Converted Stormhawk/Stormtalon

Hey, sorry for the long hiatus. I actually have several units painted that I didn't post pics of, I just didn't get around to taking pictures and editing. It's work and I'd rather paint! Anyway, this is worth posting about.

Here's the end result. This is the same model, of course. Note that I'm holding them by the wing - even though they're held together by magnets, they're very sturdy.

So here's how that works. The main chassis is littered with magnets. There's two 6x1mm Neodymium magnets on the roof to hold the cabin, two more just under the wing mount to hold the floor, and 6x4mm Neodymium magnets in the center of where the Stormtalon engines attach.

Wings have 6x4 magnets each. These magnets extrude and actually enter the rotor hole that the Stormtalon engines hold onto. If you have the model in your hands it will be obvious how this works.

Each cabin has two 6x1mm magnets on the roof and two 5x2mm magnets on the nose. These attach to the floor piece.

Finally, the floor piece has two 6x2mm magnets under where the wings would be, and a circular steel plate on the front where the tip of the cabin attaches.

I cut the little cheek extrusions from the floor piece to move the two weapon platforms closer to the model. The weapons that attach to it are magnetized: this can be a bit flimsy in case of the Lascannon as there's not enough surface area to mount strong magnets there.

I also modified all bottom-mount weapons to be very flush to the body, and they attach to the little steel plate on the bottom of the body.

Finally, I extended the tail piece just like this guy did. Kudos for the idea! It's brilliant. Look at his blog for instructions, I'm not stealing the thunder for this one.

And that's it! The model is very strong when put together. The chassis holds the cabin and the floor piece, the cabin holds the floor piece too, and it takes some muscle power to separate them. The cheek parts of the chassis are flexible so attaching and reattaching is very easy, apart from the muscle required. The wings, similarly, aren't going anywhere once they snap in.

I think I'll glue the floor piece to the acrylic stand, just to keep that from moving. Put it in some nice dynamic angle or something. Also, considering that this version of the model is significantly longer, I'll need to flip the stand so that it's leaning forwards. It looks like it'll look good.

So much about that! Thanks for looking.