Next Project: Tanks a lot!

 

I have plenty of tanks. But most of them are 6mm. I do have a very small number of 28mm tanks (2xT34 from two different manufacturers and of different sizes, a Hetzer, and a Sdkfz 222). The 6mm are fine for What A Tanker played on a small board via web cam, but they really don't cut it for a proper game. 

But I do have some 15mm tanks. I have 4 metal T34s of unknown origin, an ancient Battlefront T34 with a resin body and turret and metal accessories, and two sets of FOW El Alamein kits that I won while attending Trumpeter events. One came as a full game, the other was just the tanks.

After the extended time it took to do the 2mm terrain, I figure that doing 15 tanks was a more manageable goal within a reasonable time, especially when the all metal tanks are already done.

But I'm not going to limit myself to just assembling the plastic ones. Why build just a Grant when you can change the turret and have a Lee? Why bother with Buttoned tokens when you can button or unbutton the model?

So armed with some glue, about 260 3mm x 1mm magnets, some knives, a dremel, a drill, tweezers, some other tools, and a whole bunch of patience and ambition, I'm planning on making convertible tanks.

I started off with a Grant. Initially, I was just planning on making it buttoned/unbuttoned, but then I realized that the kit allows me to build as a Lee as well. (The instructions don't show how to build a Lee but the parts are there.) Had I realized before I started that you also had a choice of M2 and M3 for the 75mm sponson gun, I might have attempted to make that swap-able as well. On second thoughts, that might be more trouble than it's worth though.  

Anyway, here is the first tank:

This Grant is buttoned up but I can swap in the open hatch with commander. Or I can go with the Lee turret with the button or unbuttoned MG turret. Because I only have 6 British figures for 6 British tanks, I needed to make the command figures swapable too, and so I can move the commander to the open Lee hatch. The magnet that holds the open MG turret to the main turret serves a double duty as it also holds the command figure through a very thin plastic layer (you can actually see a bit of the magnet.