If you were at UK Games Expo and passed by our stand, or you follow us on social media, then you’ll be hard-pressed to have not seen the rather large mech stood next to our Konflikt ‘47 display table. This mighty machine is none other than the M2A5 Linebacker, a brand new US jump walker which will launch in plastic alongside the new edition of Konflikt ‘47 later this year. When our sculptors had finished designing the kit, there was much standing around and admiring – and then someone piped up with:
“What if we made a big one? Like, a REALLY big one?”
This had actually been one of Head of Product Peter Gosling’s visions for Konflikt ’47 all along, and so the 3d printers set to work. Now, at roughly ⅕ of ‘real life’ scale, there was no way that it could be made as one big lump – it would have to be a kit in its own right. Eventually, we had all the components printed. We just needed someone to assemble it. Enter Metal Casting’s own Steffani Sorensen, and her crack team of hobby volunteers. Steff – how on earth do you go about assembling something this massive?
Steff – Well, I started out small – literally! I got my hands on the 28mm version of the Linebacker, and worked out how it all went together. The big version was broadly printed in what would be ‘sub-assemblies’ of the actual model, so this gave me a good indication of how everything would need to fit together. Unfortunately it didn’t come with a comically oversized instruction booklet – maybe next time! I knew that I needed to tackle the feet and legs first, not only because they had the most components, but because they would also need to hold their own weight, so needed to be structurally sound and very durable. I pinned every single joint with 4mm steel wire, as well as a layer of 2 part epoxy and superglue. The superglue held the joint in place quickly while the epoxy set, and the wire gave the entire assembly the necessary structural rigidity.
With the legs built and the epoxy curing, I moved onto the main body and hip joint. This is the heaviest part of the model and couldn’t be supported by the legs alone, despite the legion of pins and wires holding them together. The weight of the chassis would be held on two single points at the hip joint, and would simply pull itself apart through gravity. To make it work,I had to take a ‘brute force’ approach and hang the chassis and hip assembly on a central steel rod, drilling straight up through the hips and into the chassis. This sounded easy. I was super confident that I’d got the hard part out of the way with the legs, and it would be smooth sailing.
I was wrong.
The hip and chassis is PLA plastic, printed in layers with a honeycomb-style filling inside. My drill didn’t like it. I didn’t like it. Rich and Boris from my team of volunteers didn’t like it. It was a nightmare.
Every time the drill bit went into the hip joint, it struck a bit of the honeycomb structure and shot off at an angle. This caused one hole to become three, all going off at different angles. This led to some… emotional moments. However, after two hours of drilling and filing and cutting with a hobby knife, we got the centre pole through the hip joint and up into the chassis. Then, we mounted it to a board using a floating shelf bracket, with the top cut off to house the centre pole and we were on to the home stretch!
The final big step was the arm assembly and all the little ‘greebles’ like thrusters, vents, and panels. Everything went together with either superglue or epoxy, and the arm joints got some hefty brass rod to pin them in place. The shoulders would carry a lot of weight, and be a pivot point so needed to be very strong, or the entire arm would just slump downward. I drilled through the top of the shoulder and into the chassis ball joint, and ran a 5mm bass rod through it, top to bottom, and this held!
After that, the next thing to do was get it all ‘mounted’, to ensure that everything sat as it ought to, and – crucially – that nothing fell off!
The final step was to file down and fill in any joins, panel lines, and the like to produce a smooth, even surface, and then it was on to painting! Next week I’ll show you how I tackled that project – but believe me, it was a lot easier than dealing with that hip joint!
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