Irrational Number Line Games, LLC

home   stuff-to-buy   idea archive   about-us   contact  

Japanese eXofauna Self Defense Force

I have a ton of 15mm US Special Forces figures (No figure count on the website so I over ordered. No big, I thought it was a reasonable price for the number of figure I thought I was getting, so I ended up with an extra, free, project.) and some kaiju. Two great things that go great together.

I also have some extra cheap tanks. They're too small for 28mm, and as you can see, they're a bit too big for 15mm.

However, with a bit of tread reduction, I think we can make them work. At arm's length, you'd never notice this. Even fairly close up, I think it will still just look like the tread's sunk in the ground a bit.

Also, you can't fight kaijy with just regular tanks. Since these come with removable turrets, I will make some turrets of my own. I start with green stuffing a piece of 22 gauge copper wire on the bottom of a bottle cap. The wire is just the right size to serve as a peg into the turret hole on the tanks. And the bottle cap is just the right size to be a turret base.

I'm thinking missile launcher for the turret. Every box launcher starts with a box. In this case, I am going to use a five-sided box (no bottom), built from this channel.

Yes, I have sacrificed my house flipping opportunity to make this template. It is a template. The ticket is too thin to make a for-use launcher, but just maliable enough to work with when designing the final product.

The first bit is to make a diagonal notch in the side. This is how the box will rest on the cap, at a slight angle.

I test fit the angle to make sure it isn't too low (no visual effect) or too high (dorky looking). Seems I guessed about right.

Now, I just draw a box template around the notch.

If you noticed that I have a straightedge and used the side of a thin piece of paper to draw the lines, well I just noticed that I did that when I was editing the pics.

So I have the five-sided box design. For some reason, I accidentally cut the upper left corner out. I knew that was wrong right as I did it.

Because I need those corners to be fold under tabs to hold the box together.

It's OK. This is just the template. I didn't wase good construction material.

One last test fit to check size and positioning of the box before I start working with the more rigid material.

Here I have repeated the pattern four times on some thick card stock. The measuring and fitting and futzing would have been too fiddly to do with this material. I will use a ball point to score the folds.

And here is the box on the cap. I added four paper dots you get from the reservoir of a three hole punch. They were just the right size for this project.

That wasn't really planned. But I've done this quite a bit, so I tend to have a feel for the size of things I need to make them work with other bits I have lying around. You should probably use those dots in the sizing process for the template.

There are certainly many other times where I got to this point and thought, Aw, man, if I had just made that a couple mm larger, this bit would fit in just perfectly.

And, of course, the JXSDF would not have a job without this guy hanging around! I think the size and style of the tank works well with this set up.

Since the turrets aren't glued on (I did glue the treads in place), I have the option to fit out two different kits on one tank body. That could come in handy to have two different types of armour support.