Launcher's photoetch crates

Enjoying flimsy metallic things

Session I

I had to start pretty much from scratch with the first crate. The main reason was that those crow's feet were poking in random directions so badly that I had to press them straight again with my tweezers. A bit like working on misbehaving Metal Earth Models bits but much worse.

Attempting to learn from my first failure I checked what youtube offered and based on that I started using a plastic ruler and an old exacto blade to make the bends. This was the closest I could get to the recommended minimum toolset of a metallic ruler and a razorblade. Whatever I had already done was pretty much bad, but the next ones at least felt like they got bent nicer.

Despite the minor improvements this narrower bit that was going to be holding the rocket's narrow engine was still pretty much horrible. Getting the pieces aligned was also quite weird. In the end I got some kind of a subassembly done, but certainly didn't look decent.

Sessions II - III

Giving completely up on the instructions I snipped off everything from the PE sprue to get the main crate out. I bent the external edges to as close to 90° as my tools allowed me to, and forcefully inserted the subassembly inside it. Then I added an amount of superglue to somehow seal the setup.

After this was out of the way I thought I'd try a different approach with the second rocket crate. I started by bending the main shape first and glued its edges shut. Again the fourth and last bend ended up the worst and I wasn't quite sure why that happened.

Maybe this was foreseeable: when the crate's gluing was cured, I started gluing the subassembly's rectangular bits straight into the crate itself. I expected this to allow me to get the short and L-bent double-T-shapes easier into place, and to make it look a bit healthier.

My first crate was so awful indeed, that I decided to not bother that building order again. Instead I committed to anything else but that, and the result was going to be what it was going to be. My expectation was that the other three would be somehow better anyway.

 

During my first three oath-filled sessions I didn't get any further than what the photo below showed. The superglue I started with was ok to get PE pieces onto plastic models just failed miserably here or had gone bad already. I bought some gel-like Loctite for the continuation, as it promised to be strong and to tolerate some amount of torque. Of course it was going to flash slower than the runny stuff, and I didn't own any zip kicker, so I bent the bits, applied glue, and left them cure overnight as I did my hobbyings in the late-ish evening.

 

Session IV

During one evening's hobby time I got the little walls somehow installed into the last two crates. I also added the long, lengthwise-installed L-shaped bits into the warhead section of the first crate. Installing those was pure horror, as I guess you had guessed already. In addition to the bits themselves were in an imperfect shape, the superglue used in quantities to hold anything in place.

Session V

One of the evenings I added the long beams into the front end of the second crate. My approach of pressing the bit against my cutting mat with the ruler, then bending the other half to right angles with the ancient exacto blade was unreliable. In case it didn't work on the first go I didn't get it angled, I found no way to fix it later without mangling the part. This time 75% of them succeeded acceptably, which was an improvement. I may have used 10x the amount of superglue actually needed, but like I said before, I was getting frustrated with attachments. These started looking like someone's first attempts at welding or something.

This was the first moment I felt like dry-fitting the other three crates on the launcher rack now, the first crate with a rocket loosely inserted. Maybe this was going to be something semiacceptable, after all.

Session VI

To start my session I just bent the remaining long L-irons, again only a part of them went ok, while others ended up being bad on one end. I glued my attempts one by one into the frames using ridiculous amounts of superglue to ensure some results.

According to the instructions there should've been 32 \_/ -shaped support bits glued to hold the long bits and the crate frame nicely and tightly together. This translated into two of those per L-bit. But the whole setup was in such an unreliable state that no piece was exactly where it was supposed to be, so adding some fixed-size supports into spaces that had, let's say somewhat dynamic spaces instead, made no sense.

Following this same train of thought to misery I didn't go and add the same amount of even smaller tiny bits into the rocket engine end of the crates. They'd all been at wrong angles at best, some would've been outside the crates, or otherwise just crapped up. I decided to save time and especially my nerves by ignoring at least 64 detail pieces from my rocket launcher.

Perhaps I should've tried to 3d print these crates at work or something. I just didn't remember immediately if we had resin or filament printers there, as that would've had an impact on the result.

 

All four crates were quite mishapen but I had some hope for painting to help hiding my numerous uselessness-caused crimes. We'd find out soon enough when the priming (with black) was done.