HELICOPTER STANDS (New-Ray Die-cast 28mm)

With Richard Clarke of 'Too Fat Lardies' fame, working on an adaption of his WW2 Chain of Command rules for the 'Modern Afghanistan' conflict, I have been inspired to work on some more of my collection for this period.

In future posts there will be more painted vehicles and figures for the Insurgents, British Infantry and USMC. I will be making a lot of buildings and terrain for this period in readiness for when Richard releases the new version of these rules.

Hopefully the terrain and buildings will also be suitable for my North West Frontier and Sudan collections and I have the Perry WW2 Desert War stuff in the pipeline which I can use this for.

I will start off with showing you what I have done with my helicopter stands. The helicopters are from a company called New-Ray and they are Die-cast 1/56 and 1/60 scale, which are perfect for 28mm. They are also excellent value as they come ready painted and you can pick them up on ebay brand new for about half the price of an unpainted 28mm resin/plastic tank/vehicle. The Apache I picked up for £12 with free postage and the Black Hawkes were £15 each.

The only problem with these helicopters is, being die-cast, they are quite heavy.  I have read about people making 'Flight Stands' for their model aircraft using clear plastic rods and magnets or retractable car aerials, which is all well and good if you are using a plastic model or it is of a smaller scale.

 If I was to go down this path I would have to probably make a tri-pod stand, with quite a large base if I wanted to give the chopper some height from the table surface and for it to still be stable (could you imagine the damage what one of those things would do to your lovely painted figures and terrain if you happened to knock it over.) 

You would also still have the problem of attaching your helicopter to your new made stand and in the end I decided to stick with the original stands that each model comes with. They have a lug on the top of the stand which slots into the underside of the chopper and a reasonable size base which makes it nice and stable.

The down side with the original stands are that they are black and also only gives the chopper about a four inch ground clearance. If they had been made of clear plastic, I could have used them as they were but as you will see, I have now upgraded them to blend in more with the table.

I started off by covering the base in white PVA glue and then dipping it in your favourite basing material, sand/scatter/ballast. When dry, spray the whole stand in white primer and then when dry, spray in a suitable desert colour. I used Bolt Action German Dunkelgelb spray paint which I happened to have at hand and the colour would do at a push.

I then got some of that white packaging that Perry Miniatures used to use for packing their figures in those little black boxes and dipped this very lightly into PVA glue and then again dipped very lightly into suitable basing material, scatter or sand.  When dry, give a light spray with Dunkelgelb and when dry fit this over the stand and tease it out to give it the effect of the down draft of the chopper kicking up a sand storm.

Enough of my nattering and on with the pictures.