The spacey undercarriage

A problem

The first and the largest problem with those feet I cut off so many years ago was that simply regluing them in place wasn't just that easy and simple. Judging by the profile of the bits I had just cut and snapped them off with side cutters, very crudely. That had made the potential contact surface incredibly narrow and as the paws were supposed to carry to full weight (increased by the greeblies) of the model, I had to reinforce it somehow.

My great idea was to check if someone had made a 3d model of them and then print out replacements. Nope, no one had done that, not for this exact model nor just about anything else, either.

An attempt to fix it

My go-to reinforcement method so far has been lenghts of paperclip, that has worked with OmniMechs and whatnot pretty nicely. Just as I was going to get working I realized I had somehow misplaced my old Citadel-made pin vise drill and I really couldn't find it anywhere in the house. So I bought a new one that came with a couple of different sized drill bits too (they had a set with something like 20 different drill bits as well, but I wasn't quite that mad yet).

I started by cutting off two pieces per landing gear and by bending them into a useful angle for these purposes. Those pieces I superglued onto the mangled landing gears. After that I drilled a few holes into the also badly mangled landing gear bays so I could install these later.

At this point I had realized that it wasn't going to be enough. Most likely this setup would need some diagonal support in the form of push-rods or something. That wouldn't end up looking just like in the movies, but the way I saw it, actual planes also had structures like the things I was imagining in my mind, the end result would look kind of plausible.

Update

My approach didn't work. The installation was not succesful and the paperclip bones did not fit in (and they had no good grip inside the spaceframe, either). Maybe this was all foreseeable, but it was something I had to try.

I was pondering if I should try to scratchbuild new ones out of styrene. Most likely it'd be a too ambitious a thing to start with in a model this prominent. Especially as I had no proven skills in that area of the hobby. I decided to sleep on it.