"Mounting Micro Armor Tank Turrets" Topic

For my Flames of War armies, I keep the tank turrents loose so that I can rotate them during games. I was wondering if you do the same with Micro Armor tanks, or do you glue them on. I guess it depends on the rules, but what is most typically done. Keeping them separate at this scale seems awfully fiddly.

I glue mine. Makes it a lot harder to lose them. If I want rules thsat require turret/gun facing I'll use my 15mm figs.

Just my take

Jake

I believe most glue them on as very few miniature rulesets require rotating turrets. However they are cool.

If you want them to rotate I know of the following methods.
1) Keep them loose … not very practical
2) Bluetack … easy to do but fiddly to use.
3) Strong rare earth magnets … refer to GHQ forum … expensive and lots of wotk.
4) Bees wax … never tried it.
5) My own round headed pin method link

I pin mine. Drill a small hole on the base of the turret with a pin vise. Then put the turret on. While the turret is on place, put a drop of CA glue on a small ball-headed pin, cut down to 3-4mm long. Voila! Turrets that ritate and don't get lost!

Excellent tip! I've been pondering the question of glue or not to glue for quite some time. I do believe that your tips here have answered the question for me.

Thank You,

SpartanWarrior

I started glueing them after running games at a couple cons and finding that rotating turrets promoted players findling with them and breaking barrels.

Glue the turrets down. I also replace the barrels with thin nylon bristles from a vegetable/washing up brush.

I use white glue so they can be removed with some water if I want to. As to barrels, I replace some of mine with piano wire. It stops the "barrel benders" and bites back if they push on the end while fiddling with the tank.

Aaaaaaah…….never, never, never, glue the turrets down!

Mini-tank sacrilege is what you are advocating.

Just keep them in Panzer Keepers, admonish those that fool with or bend the barrels, and perform a formation review prior to putting the stuff on the table, or away.

The blue tack, pinning, or mini-magnets are all excellent methods for additional security, but I just use the above system and rarely have any problems.

Of course, as many have heard, a sharp rap on the knuckles with a ruler might serve as a reminder to offenders as well, like they used to do in grade school for those not paying attention.

Rare earth magnets. Bacause I have loads allready for various modelling projects, and the added cost per vehicle isn't that much. Same goes for the time spent per vehicle getting them in place. But to each his own, I say :D

Just to be clear, all the methods are a trade off between amount of effort and quality of result. From least effort to best result for rotating turrets it's
1) leave turret off
2) bluetack
4) Beeswax
5) round headed pin
4) rare earth magnet.
Pick your optimal effort/quality trade-off point.

Teeny-tiny rare-earth Magnets.

Check out the GHQ website forum. There's a thread titled "Temporary Basing and Rotating Turrets." A poster named 8ball has provided a detailed description of how to use those tiny and "curiously strong" rare-earth magnets to attach turrets of micro-armor, and they can still rotate.

That's how I do all of mine. Check it out.

On the odd occasion I want loose turrets I use Blu-tak, but generally I just stick them down.

I have been gluing mine with white glue since 1974 when a hole bunch of turrets went all over the place in transit to a game.

Loose turrets are sacrilege… people has been burned at stakes for that heresy…

BTW using my microarmor for grand tactical gmaes where stands represent platoon I have never felt the need to have lose turrets. Other than bein a bit unpractical it'ìs also hampers when you try to create a little diorama effect on your bases.

Magnets are too big of a pain for that scale.

Ah, but the original post was asking about for Flames of War (15mm scale). A couple of the guys at the shop have magnetized their turrets. It's reasonably affordable to buy a whole pile of small RE magnets from say, K&J Magnetics ( kjmagnetics.com ), roughly 1/16th inch round. Staggs has never had a problem with losing his turrets, either.

Oops. guess I should read a little better.

No this was his "pcelella" original Q.

"I was wondering if you do the same with Micro Armor tanks" not (15mm scale).

One other way and really cheap is take a standard size hole punch (for paper) and a refrigerator magnet, then you punch out a hole lot of small magnetic circles, and place them on the bottom of the turret.

We used to use lose turrets earl 70's becase the rule gave rotation rate of the turret. It was ok with 1-10 vehicleas in a game but anything larger became a pain. plus with gun tubes bending, it was just not worth it.

I've got some 10mm tanks coming in. What techniques work for them? I am leaning toward gluing them down (white glue) just for convenience, but rotating is neat.

Magnets work quite well, but so does drilling a hole up through the bottom of the tank into the turret and gluing a pin into the hole in the turret. Your drilling doesn't need to be as accurate when you're using magnets, though.

The 'D101' 1/16" dia x 1/32" thick magnets are pretty cheap, $6 USD per hundred, and are probably the right size for sticking under 10mm tank turrets. Alternately, the 1/8" x 1/32" might work. It just depends how big your turret rings are.

I know Staggs used larger ones for his Shermans.

Both the magnet and pin methods seem like premium solutions to me. Very nice to consider, all pro, no con, except that I won't find the time to actually DO either.

In the past I've left the turrets loose on medium and heavy tanks, and used white glue to glue 'em down on smaller light tanks and armored cars.

But more recently I've experimented with other choices.

I've tried tacky glue. You can pick it up at most crafts stores for a trivial amount of money (maybe US$1.00 for a "lifetime supply" sized bottle). It seems OK to me, particularly for small vehicles like light tanks and armored cars. I expect beeswax would be similar, except I can't find any to buy.

On my medium and heavy tanks I've now started using white glue to create a similar effect to the pin method. My technique works with GHQ or H&R tanks, with hollow chassis and thin turret stalks, but not with CinC with their solid chassis and thick turret stalks (I revert to tacky glue in that case). When I've finished painting the tanks, I turn them over and place a big drop of glue on the turret stalk from below. Then I move on to some other task. Come back in 20-30 minutes -- just enough time for the glue to become tacky -- and rotate the turret a full 360o each way. This seperates the glue on the stalk from the glue lining the hole. Once the glue has dried, you will find that the turret turns freely (better than the tacky-glue solution), yet if you turn your tanks upside-down, about 3/4ths of them will retain their turrets. You can repeat the process on the ones that don't, until they do.

Not as sure a mounting as magnets or pin-heads, but easier to do.

-Mark 1

Just glue the damn things on. If you are using 6mm rules that worry about turret facing, you need new rules not rotating turrets.

Actually I have used my long forgotten skills with soldering iron to put a dab of solder on the H&R turret pegs so they always stay on, and rotate. This is not possible with GHQ/CinC due to the metal they use, and the size of the hole…a pity.
I think the figs look more convincing with turrets rotated in all different directions as the game progresses. There is another benefit I discovered by accident. When soldering on the pin, some heat transfer takes place, and this does an incredible job on bonding the paint to the metal. Almost like baking it on. I have not had any paint chipping off the turrets since I started doing this, and there is no discoloration either with acrylics although when I tried with the older enamels painted figs, the paint did darken just a bit.
So now I 'lift' by the turret because I hate pint chipping.
Cheers
Greg