Evening gents,
Started working on the armaments for the figs on the ground. The GI guarding the prisoner will be holding an M1 Thompson (or M1928A1, will have to look closer when back at the bench). The prisoner's M1 Garand will be on the ground, and the other GI inspecting the prisoner's belongings will have his M1 slung over his shoulder.
Rather than do the one piece foil or tape sling, I wanted to better replicate the somewhat complex nature of the multipart real 1:1 scale sling, like this:
The Dragon Gen3 GI sets include a PE fret that includes some very well detailed, multi-part slings for the M1, plus some helmet straps (not so good). The problem with these brass PE slings are: 1) Unless you anneal the brass (to soften it), it's hard to get the brass to have a realistic "drape" to it. 2) There is no good connection point on plastic M1 stock. (The Gen3 Garands and Thompson have the clip/buckle molded onto the stock, but just glueing the end of the brass sling to these would not provide a very good bond, and would also not be that realistic.)
So, to get closer to the real thing, I cut the plastic clips off the Gen3 Garand. Next, I drilled some really small holes (my smallest bit basically) at each place on the stock where one of these clips go: 1 on the butt, one at the end of the wood stock, and one close to the barrel end. Using the Aber set of buckles & straps, I cutoff 3 single loop buckles. Instead of trimming both ends where the buckle was connected to the fret, I left one nub. This remaining nub would act as a connection point into the micro hole I drilled before, creating a solid, positive connection.
Photo research shows that the clip by the barrel was rarely used, and these things appear to have some back-to-front "swivel" to them, so I bent the front one back.
Now, if you're wondering, couldn't I just anneal the Dragon PE slings, and thread them through my new "stronger" connection points? Well, that would be great, but the PE slings are larger than my clips. And, if I went with bigger clips to accommodate the PE slings, frankly, they would look ridiculously large. In the end, I think the Dragon slings are slightly over scale.
So, it's on to crafting some lead foil replacement slings. So, based on our family and friend's love of the vino, I pretty much have an endless supply of lead foil from wine bottles. And yes, some vintners still use real lead foil... I start out out by flattening the foil on a piece of glass, using a section of 3/4" copper pipe (left over from my other hobby: home remodeling):
It's amazing how malleable this stuff is. Any wrinkles just get completely smoothed out. Here's the flattened piece of lead foil:
Onto to slicing up the foil for the sling. The target width is just slightly less than the Dragon PE, and my new custom width will fit nicely into my new clips on the Garand.
Using both the Dragon PE as a guide for length, along with the ref pics, I make the new slings. Note that there are a couple types of slings, both webbing style and leather. The leather ones seems to be more common. One detail that Dragon did particular well on their PE slings were the locking clips on the end of each leather piece. These basically engaged the double row of holes on the end of the longer section of sling. I simply trimmed these pieces off the PE part and glued them to my new lead foil sling. Now, unfortunately, I could not devise a good way to replicate the holes on the sling (like the PE part), basically due to the fact that there's not a lot of width to work with on my new lead foil sling. So, I'm simply suppressing my severe case of AMS on this particular detail.
Here's the work in progress, with some identifying text to help make up for letting you down on the hole thing...
And, after threading the slings and adding some additional details, here's the final results:
So, in the end, not a ton of progress today, but slowly making it through the details. Tomorrow looks to be a miserable day, so I'll be hunkered down in the workshop trying to wrap these mini-dudes up!!!
