Saturday 19 March 2011

Hlaka! Dive!

With the upcoming release of our Hlaka figures I am getting excited again. I am very hopeful that I will have quantities of these in stock by month end - I am hoping to pick the figures up next weekend, in fact, when we attend Hot Lead!, in Stratford, ON. (Note: we are attending as gamers, not dealers.)

As 1/2 of the figures are airborne poses I have been starting to think about flying stands. One could just mount them on slottas, or similar bases, or on those little plastic ones GW uses. Or you could use a piece of wire going to some other base - this is what I had intended to use myself.

After recently attending Cold Wars, however, I have another idea. While at the convention I picked up some flight stands intended for the "Check Your 6" WW2 Air Combat game by a company called Armaments In Miniature. These are resin stands that use a telescoping car aerial with a powerful magnet at the top. There are several styles , and I picked up some of the largest two styles to try with my Air Cars.

I was just putting one together and it occurred to me that maybe I can use it for my flying Hlaka. Each stand comes with a metal screw intended to go into the model, the flat top of which snaps tight to the magnet at the top of the stand.

What if I wind wire around the screw with a flying Hlaka at each end? I could mount several Hlaka around each stand...

Now I don't have any castings to try this out but I did try a large washer with several 28mm figures on the stand and it balances fairly well. And this was without any extra weights in the base (the largest models allow one to insert pennies to make the bases heavier.) I think that if the figures are spaced fairly evenly around the stand it will be pretty stable. In addition to looking nicer, the telescoping bit has 6 increments, allowing for different heights to be used. Now this may not be relevant to your rule set but it could make the models more esthetically pleasing regardless.

1 comment:

  1. I'll look forward to seeing these; I based ours on simple 40mm clear disks with a wire holding up the flying ones. Boring, but they had to match our old Hlaka.

    Yours do look really good; we love the animation of the poses!

    ReplyDelete