Clipped Wings and Magnetic Doors

It's been a long time since I pre-ordered my Storm Ravens, in fact since then I have traded one of them in for more Tyranid models to complete my 1500pt force! Only one though because I always knew I wanted to field at least one at some point in the future.

On my return from a short trip to Berlin earlier this week I decided that the time had come to put the Storm Raven together. It's a pretty easy kit to work with and it went together really well, the only slightly tricky parts are the struts on the cockpit covers for both the pilot and the gunner, I think the clear screens are going to be tricky once I get to them.



Also in its favour is how easy it is to magnetise the weapons on the turret. If you do not fit the bar designed to hold the guns onto the sides of the turret, a 4mm hole is left on either side which is the perfect size for one of my little magnets. With this taken care of all you need to do is drill a hole in the weapon to fit a magnet to the guns, I didn't bother with the drilling and to be honest it looks fine without recessing these magnets.



To magnetise the side door options I did what I usually do which is to take a length of sprue just wider than the door aperture, build up the ends with discs of sprue to give you some relief from the hull. I glue the sprue into place across the doorway and then glue a magnet onto the centre of the piece of sprue. In this case it was very difficult to tell whether or not I would be able to just glue the other magnets to doors directly or if they would need to be built up in order to connect to to the magnet in the doorway. In order to ensure I didn't mess this up I used some grey-stuff to fix the magnet in place on the door, this way if it was not close enough I could move it around and build it up as required. As it turned out I needed to build up the magnets on the doors quite a bit so I would say to anyone else that you do not need to move the sprue too far back from the hull if at all.



I wanted to leave the canopies clear so I had to paint the pilot and gunner before completing the assembly, I'm also trying to work out how to magnetise the front facing guns but I may just not bother with it an use blue-tack to secure them to the assembly.







Anyway, that's all for now. I'll be continuing to work on it this week so I'll try and keep you all updated.