Shadowsword/Stormlord Magnetisation WIP - Part 1

Having provided a teaser pic a few weeks ago, now its time to actually show some more WIP shots of the Shadowsword/Stormlord (/Doomhammer/Banehammer/Banesword/Stormsword - that's a lot of /'s).

In order to be able to make all the variants, some degree of magnetisation would be needed - which really means magnetising everything! Surprisingly so far that has been quite easy, as can be seen in the following pictures.

I started off by gluing the front and rear sections of the side armour together and let that set. As the magnets won't be visible, I went for a larger size, 4mm x 1mm, to help them grip the magnets on the outer panels.

To make sure that the magnets lined up properly, and had the same correct polarity, I used an applicator magnet (magnet with some greenstuff for a handle) on the outer side. Then I applied a drop of super glue on the panel and using the opposite polarity applicator, carefully placed the magnet onto the panel. Using this process means that the removable panels can be swapped over to any slot without worry.

With the side section turned over, no magnets can be seen, in case I ever wanted to use the tank without any side armour, or sponsons.

Next up were the side armour panels. As the rectangular guide pieces are slightly larger than 4mm, I had to use a smaller magnet, only 2mm wide. I started off by drilling a 1mm hole, roughly in the centre of the raised piece. Then I widened the hole using a 2mm drill bit. A lot of time was then spent getting the hole just deep enough for the magnet to sit flush. Trying not to drill through the whole piece was the main worry here.

With the hole the correct width and depth, I used the same magnet applicator process as before to glue the magnet in place. Again, quite a bit of time was spent double checking the magnet polarity's to avoid any mistakes.

Here you can see that I managed to avoid drilling all the way through the armour panels, and there is no sign that these have been magnetised.

Next up was the top section. This was pretty much a repeat of the process for the side section. Once again the magnet applicator was used to get the magnets in the correct position. One thing to note, these magnets will be close to the one's on the side section once the whole thing is glued together. I thought this may cause problems with the magnets trying to attract or repel each other, but after dry fitting it doesn't seem to be an issue. If larger/different size/shape magnets were used instead then this may be a problem.

Once again the magnets aren't visible on the top side of the section.

With the top section finished, next to be magnetised were the top armour panels, and the top of the sponson. This was a fairly simple job. My 4mm magnets wouldn't sit inside the guide pieces again, but after removing 2 opposite edge's, the magnets fit perfectly. This was done for all three pieces. Using the applicators (I can't stress how useful these are!), and with several minutes of double checking, I super glued the magnets in place. Once the glue was dry, I checked that the panels fit correctly onto the top piece, and once satisfied, I glued the magnets on to the other pieces.

Here you can see the top armour panels for the other side of the super heavy. These were magnetised in exactly the same way as those above.

With the magnetisation of the top and side sections complete, I had some time to glue the inside section together, and add the running wheels to the front and back.

Having let the inside section to dry for some time, I was ready to glue the inside and outside sections together. This is a little bit fiddly as the pieces want to move apart at the top and bottom. To get around this I used the front and rear armour pieces, with some elastic bands, to keep the top in line. Then I used the long track section, with an elastic band, to keep the bottom correctly aligned.

And here is a pic showing the track in place on the bottom of the completed side section.

Next up I'll be magnetising the other side section and getting the rest of the tracks glued on to this one. Thanks for taking the time to read through all of this.