Thanks folks - your support is what's kept me going through the good (and not so good) during this project. I'm certainly getting the hours in now - which is wonderful.
It’s time to secure some of the more ‘floaty’ aspects of the interior. I used metal plates and magnets to fix the driver’s and gunner’s seats in place and I knew I had a plentiful supply of super tiny magnets (tiny is 2mm in diameter and 1mm tall) so they might come in handy here.
I wanted to keep the floor plates anchored to the floor. As luck would have it, the design I used to 3d print out the floor grills has ‘bolt heads’ at the corners of individual grills. These bolt heads are about the same size as my tiny magnets so I drilled out a couple in each floor plate, drilled corresponding holes in the actual floor of the APC, added tiny magnets to both and super-glued them in. That worked a treat! Plastic tweezers were essential but didn’t stop a couple of the tiny magnets pinging across the room. I suppose I’ll find them if I wear my steel toe-capped boots.
Two ‘sticks’ of tiny magnets, floor plate, pin vice and plastic tweezers!
You can just about see the two tiny round magnets in this image, above the large metal plates that secure the driver’s and gunner’s seats.
Next, I could do with anchoring the seating module that Ripley and Burke use which also contains the 2 auto sentry gun systems in their stowage crates. This piece of the model is a little large and heavy for my tiny magnets so I thought a more mechanical solution would be better. A double pin-and-slot sliding arrangement was the answer. It would place the seating unit snugly against the wall and allow it to be pulled up and out when needed. I built a bracket from styrene sheet which allows a brass rod to slide down it. This brass rod would be attached to the back of the seating unit.
Bracket and rod.
Bracket in place on the wall.
Here’s the brass rod - put through the back of the seating unit and glued in place. The wall-mounted bracket it slides down into can be seen behind (partially painted green).
Here it is in place - holding the seating in place quite securely.
I’ve since added small zip ties to the wiring loom in strategic places, leaving me access to the batteries and any other items I need to be able to remove, then added blobs of hot glue where I didn’t need / want wires to move around. Pics of that and more next time!
