Sunday, 2 February 2014

B-Wing rotating magnetic mount

Love B-Wings but don't love them vertically? How about 90º or 45º or even 17.5º? Fed up with tight fitting mounts on other ships? On any given day I change my mind a lot and I'm always tweaking how things look and B-Wings for X-Wing Miniatures is something I couldn't tweak and that irked me, so after a few Google searches I found the solution, earth magnets.



They're ridiculously small, perfectly formed, powerful, and fairly high priced, I guess you can't have it all. Though eBay came up trumps with a pack of 50 3/32" x 1/16 earth magnets and x2 drill bits for $17 + postage. Then you just need a steady hand and a dot of super glue.




The 3/32 size magnet and drill is key as this is small enough to drill into the vertical peg to mount the magnet of all X-wing miniatures bases. I've used them on all my ships as it just makes mounting them that much easier and I didn't like the way some ships needed a firm pressure to mount them to the peg, now it's a simple clip and they're done.



They can still spin which may not suit all and unlike other mods using earth magnets and BB gun pellets which allow the ship to bank, this mod won't do that. I did try with some BB pellets but just couldn't get the ships to sit firmly enough, they'd slide down the side... not the look I was going for. I think this was down to me not recessing the magnet into the female half of the ship stem, but give it a go and see what you think.

With the larger ships like the YT-1300 and Firespray their triangular stem fittings like I said have been tight, so a little bit of filling on the male half on the straight edges of the triangle sorted this problem.



Then careful drilling, a couple of earth magnets later and your YT-1300 as heavy as this girls is will barrel roll no problem without coming unstuck.


I have had a few problems along the way, check the polarity of all your magnets before gluing them in so all bases are the same, or you'll have you're very own repulser life bases, nice. When gluing the magnet make sure they are parallel to the base or your ships will look lopsided, a little jig can solve this. 

If you're like your fleet converted and haven't got steady hands, contact me at and I can convert your fleet no problem.



No comments:

Post a Comment