Our new PacFed vehicles are designated as grav tanks, so when I assembled some I wanted them to be hovering just above the table – not flying, but not sat on the surface either. I spent a little while think about how I would achieve this, and came up with a solution using one of our normal flying stands.
The first thing I did was to find the balance point of each hull – to do this I used a hexagonal pencil and balanced the model on it. It’s quite a delicate operation, but you should be able to make the model balance. Note how far along the hull the pencil is in relation the model – this is the model’s centre of gravity, and where you want to mount the base. When you do this, make sure the turret is on the model (which I forgot to do :-() – the weight of the turret, especially a large metal turret like the Cougar’s, can shift the balance point significantly.
The grav skirts for each vehicle have holes in the middle, in which the resin hulls sit. This means that if you turn each vehicle over you can get at the bottom of the hull. I drilled a hole about 6-8mm deep into the resin using a 5mm bit. Be careful not to go too deep, you don’t want to come out the top of the hull ! The sheet of bubble wrap stops the model slipping and protects the paint job from scratching.
I then took a normal plastic flying stand (clear or black, the choice is yours) and cut the post down very short (about 6mm/ΒΌ”). I then fixed this into the hole in the hull using some gloopy superglue (you could use an epoxy like Araldite, a contact adhesive such as Evo-Stick or even a hot-glue gun – anything with a bit of substance, but not a runny superglue).
If you’ve got the balance point right then the model should sit happily on the base while the glue dries – if you wanted to be safe then you could support the model until it’s set. To make a super-stable model you could put one of our base-weights in the base, but I haven’t done so.
And that’s it – you now have PacFed tanks that hover about a quarter of an inch off the table with no visible means of support !
Nice! I’ve taken to using my usual figure bases – pennies or washers – to prop up my air-lifted vehicles. Vehicles with grav skirts usually just get a single penny (just enough to get the skirts off the tabletop) while grav vehicles get 2 or 3 to float a bit higher.