Mine-blowing rollers

Anti-tank mine detonation device

In a sense this was a pretty simple construct to be installed in front of a tank. A silly amount of steel wheels with little feet on them were set on an axle that was attached on a holder. The tank would just push this setup in front of it and its ground pressure would be enough to trigger the mines without the wheels specially flinching from the explosions - and if they did, they'd suffer less than the tank and its crew.

n+1 wheels

At a first glance I managed to shock myself with an expectation of a deranged (and unreliable result expectation) amount of work when I thought I had to install each and every single of the little feet on the rollers, but I I was mistaken again. Each roller required only two bits to be glued on, to places left by the sprue points.

Had one or both of each of the manually installed bits gone a bit wonky or funky, that wasn't going to be really noticeable in the whole wheel. And even if it did, that could've been just a sign of an explosion twisting some metal.

I started my roller build with four of them, because the numbers in the instructions dictated that you were to build two pairs, and then in a different step it showed two sets of three. I had to start somewhere and that somewhere happened to be this one: substep 11-b.

On my first building burst I didn't get to complete more than six rollers, so while waiting for some of them to set I built other subassemblies like the 11-a pair and the 11-c, the bit where the axle was going to be installed. I sanded off all the crap I could, as I expected them to be nicer to paint this way.

The next time I was low on optinos, so I kept churning out rollers. Out of the ten rollers I had already done six, so the remaining four were not a real problem.

I had to admit that I was wondering why the instructions had such a small amount marked, when there were quite a few still in the other sprue (a full copy of the ones I had now done, to be more exact). My alarms weren't ringing too hard but they were making some noises to keep me from gluing anything fixed yet. Of course I dry-fitted the rollers on the axle.

n+1 rollers * 2

At this point it ought to have been crystal clear: the numbers in the instrcution sheet didn't say how many rollers or roller pairs were to be done, you had to get it from the pictures and lines. Good thing that I wasn't any further in the process than this.

Just a bit bothered by this I decided to work on something else for a moment before jumping on the remaining ten rollers.

One silly day I used a working from home lunchbreak to build my remaining rollers. Like I said a bit further above, the rollers came off the sprue nicely and there was little to clean.

The original set of rollers I set as they were on the axle, this second half I at least attempted to glue into pairs first and then into bunches (two pairs into the inner bit, three pairs into the outer bit). The free-floating rollers felt a bit too loose and flimsy in a way, like the photo below showed.

I was a bit baffled by the amount of loose space for these relatively few rollers, as if a handful was still missing per section. There were no more bits, however, and this did look quite a lot like what the cover art and the instructions showed. Funny thing.

Assembly line

Now all my mine rollers were set together, some more and some less, and I could construct the rest of the device. The rolling frame was glued in (and attached with two intertwined metal loops so it wouldn't fall too far if an explosion broke their mechanical connection). The angle between these two was left to a tiny guiding wedge and my eyeballed feeling. Maybe it was straight enough.

After a short glue-curing break I glued the three final pieces into this setup: the curved bit to the end, the attachment hook for the cables, and the eyelet for said cables.

Painting-constructing mumblings

At this point I stopped, of course, to ponder on the soon upcoming painting operation. How would I get this beast painted so that there were no visible shadowed areas? Should I just prime and basecoat this and the tank separately, before joining them together forever? That sort of an approach only caused more problems, as the premeditated attachment points rarely hit as accurately as one planned.

One quickly conjured up idea was to build almost the full mine roller first and only leave the attachment part to be painted alongside the tank itself. That was I could spin this setup pretty freely and concentrate especially on the rollers in the most convenient way possible.

Except that this damn thing still needed the cables attached after it got glued onto the tank, the cables that somehow kept the mine clearer in a correct angle. Perhaps I would paint the rollers first somehow, to get them out of the way, and then attach this setup for the easier part of painting the static parts? Or maybe I would just glue the rollers in one fixed position, I wasn't going to be driving this model on the floors and tables anyway.

It was better to ponder on these things in advance instead of swearing like a pirate while attempting to paint... but it did make me grumble a bit anyway.