Empire Outriders, part 4

The Outrider unit is finally assembled.

The musician was altered slightly. Originally, the musician is armed with either a pistol or a repeating pistol, but I wanted something different. There are plenty of repeater handguns on the kit's sprue that could be modified.

Here is the basic repeater handgun piece:


My plan is to lop off the right arm so the weapon will be held by the left arm, leaving the musician able to have his horn in his right.

With the mini being plastic, it was very easy to snip away the arm, and carve and file away the hand:




The only tricky part is to leave enough material to show the trigger. A very sharp knife helps. I also put a little putty on the stock to fill in some gaps.

Here is the fully-assembled musician:







The unit leader underwent a similar conversion. His original weapon was a grenade launcher, a weapon that is good for heavily-armored targets but once again I wanted something a bit different ( and a higher quantity of shots).

In the kit, there is one repeater handgun that is separate, i.e. with no arms/hands molded in. With a bit of snipping, I freed the leader's arm from the grenade launcher and cut the repeater handgun to fit:



The trigger guard broke on each weapon - not too surprising since it is thin. The butt of the repeater handgun's stock was trimmed to allow the hand to fit within and to get the trigger guard back together. Also, I rotated the wrist. Test-fitting of the new weapon showed that it would not fit alongside the horse's neck. I scored the wrist along the cuff but I did not cut it completely through. A part of the wrist was left intact, and I twisted the wrist gently to get it into the proper angle, then filled in the gap with glue. This was a bit of an experiment, as I would usually just cut if off completely and then drill and pin the wrist back to the forearm. Hopefully, the joint will be strong enough.

This is the finished weapon:


And, the fully-assembled leader:


In retrospect, I can see that the pose of the arm is a bit awkward; I hope that nobody else notices!





Here is the entire unit, together:


The horses are leaning a bit, but it does rank up together nicely, and should be a good-looking unit once painted.


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