Land Raider Ares, part 4

Attaching the siege shield.  What a pain in the arse that was!

No, I take that back.  It was just very challenging since I needed to move the rams' positions, their shape and their size AND make them look like they were engineered that way.

I attached them with very small amounts of superglue, just enough to hold them in place.  I like the Loctite Gel Control glue. It's pricey, about $7 Canadian for 4ml but it definitely does the job.   It enabled me to find the placement that I wanted.  What I did after I found their sweet spot was to draw lines around in pinpoint Sharpie. I needed to shorten those rams for the final placement, since they just let the siege shield sit out too far.  All it would take would be one crazy Bomb Squig to run in through the gap and it'd be Game Over, man!

I guesstimated the required length of the rams then hacked them down. I cut the pistons off as I knew I would have to change those later. I did try magnetising the rams, so that I could glue them to the body and attach/remove the shield for storage.  I didn't have any success unfortunately due to early setting of the glue for the magnet inside the left ram - before I could get it to the correct depth. I tried to compensate by countersinking the magnet in the shield but I was awfully close to actually penetrating (heh, heh. Shut up, Beavis) the shield.

D'OH!

After deciding to fix the rams to the shield I realised that making the pistons the right length would be easier.  Evergreen Scale Models to the rescue again with .100" rod styrene.  After attaching the rams, I was able to use their placement to make pistons the correct length, trimming and gluing as required.  Easy peasy.

You'll see that I filled the holes where the rams usually attach on a Vindicator siege shield, and added some filler around the rams new placement. This left a quite suitable gap between shield and hull.  Lovely.  Next time, ARMOUR! :)