It walks! Or at least, it stands...All the extra effort to prep and balance the legs has paid off.
Pictured below is the second set with the waist section in place.
The legs sit perfectly balanced even with the walking set on its toes. Spending some time at the beginning working out the pose before gluing the leg sections in a stance really paid off in the end. I could imagine all sorts of problems trying to get the feet to sit flat.
I am rather happy how the prone stance turned out. I was a little apprehensive at first as there are a lot of Warhound titans with very strange and unnatural poses on the internet.
With the aid of the magnet, I used a metal ruler to give a large enough surface on top to use a level. I used a 3 axis level on its flat to ensure a level centre pivot for the body. I considered leaning it forward as others had done but thought this was unrealistic as far as the machine would operate. It would mean the floor in the interior would not always remain level. I would expect that the advanced gyro's keeping this up would want to remain balanced.
This is the first set, or the walking set all glued together.
You can see here the 3 axis level used to get the pivot mount perfectly level. The magnet came in real handy holding the metal ruler in place.
Next up was fitting the pistons to the feet now that the pose has been finalised.
I've read a lot of people dislike this part and find it tedious and fiddly. The hydraulics come in two parts, piston and ram, of which you will need to cut each one to suit he mount. This gives almost infinite variability in the pose. I worked out an easy approach of dry fitting all the pistons on the bottom, then, using the ram cylinder, measured the right length for each piston and cut them in place. I then remove the set and glue them together off the leg, before finally setting them in place. It worked a treat and I had no issues, fixing everything in place in about 30 minutes.
There are 5 sets around each ankle. There is an additional 3 sets to go around the ball joints on the upper legs, however I have left theses at this point to let the epoxy cure before I pin the ball joints in place.
As mentioned in an earlier post, I used 2x 3x3mm magnets in the shins of each titan leg with the aim of making the shin guards removable so I can swap between each of the two designs. Below you can see how I inserted a piece of 0.3mm sheet metal into the recess grove for the mounts. This was done because lining up the magnets on each side is painfully tedious, and the shin guards tended to wobbly a bit thanks to mismatched slots (probably from casting). Not to mention trying to get 8 shin guards with all the same spacing was going to be a nightmare!
Here are most of them done. This way i will be able to chop and change the styles at will, along with being able to show/paint the detail that is normally hidden by them. It seamed a shame to hide it all away, as there in a lot!
The shin guards mount up as below, and snap into place nice and firmly.
You can see how much detail is hidden on the front when fitted.
Here is the other part to the magnet equation on the waist section. You can see the 20mm magnet centred in the pivot joint on this section of the upper body.
If you look closely you will see a pinch of green stuff on the side of the engine cowling. This is where I inserted one of four pins to strengthen the assembly.
Below you can see the second rear body section with the pins being fitted.
All the pins went in at acute angles to help reinforce the assembly in every axis possibe.
The whole structure weighs in at several kilograms once finished, hence why I opted to use 2 N52 20mm magnets for the centre waist pivot. This will allow me to transport the titans far easier.
I used the front section assembly (pictures posted in Part 3) whilst dry fitting and for final assembly of the rear body section. It is very important to get everything as square as possible between the two halves, not only for strength, but for final assembly. The two body halves will remain separate at this point so I can paint the interiors. Once that is done I will glue an pin the two halves together before finishing the outside prep and paint.
We are almost there now. Next steps are to pin the leg ball joints to the waist section, fit the pistons and finish the prep before a bath and undercoat is applied. Before that happens I will need to fit the heads and weapon systems which will both be magnetized.
I also have some progress to report on the Reaver Titan, but that can wait until the next post.
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