Hummers to Humvees - part 4

Hello,

as my plans slowly turn to realisations, they're mostly shattered and dropped. This time, I've decided I will indeed stick with .50 cals, which I'll now refer to as M2... .50 cal is kinda cowboy term, and we call the caliber 12.7 mm. I have already started converting some Studio miniatures zombies to gunners - well their torsos at least. It's a slow progress, but I'm learning few tricks regarding the equipment and helmets sculpting. I hope they turn out decent! Once they're done, I need to find a good position for them and M2, as TAG's guns I'm using are a bit too large and my mounts diameter appears small for the gun.

I  have also decided to ditch the idea of jerry cans rack and spare wheel - I don't have either so I will just add them sometime in the future if I ever get the cans or extra wheels.

What I did, however, was the snorkel exhausts. I couldn't find any good way to do it. Drilling a hole in it would take too much effort (to pin something on) and I couldn't find appropriate rod to act as an exhaust...any rod, to be precise. I've raided many different stores and I couldn't find any thicker wires or brass rods and such. Nothing :(. My brother later suggested me a tube he calls something like "shrinkey" - its a tube that shrinks when heated.  I wasn't sure if that will work at first, as you can see on photo below, tube was quite large compared to what I needed (I needed size of a nail). It took me some time to get a hang of it..but once I've found this perfectly sized nail, things got much better. The snorkels fit perfectly and I will glue them on later (if I skip a bit, I got humvees now painted and I forgot to put the exhausts on for spraying run -.-). So, what I did was cut appropriate lenght of "shrinkey",  put it on a nail and heated it with a lighter.  In the end I've put a cap of miliput on it and that's done. One is a bit bent, other one is perfect.

Here is a somewhat useless photo of progress on the gun mounts. As said, those triangles where you'd mount a gun on appear to be too short.

I've also done the front bumpers with a wire cutting rod. They're both very simple. I used floral wire for bumpers, roughly shaped around a pencil. Measurments were by the eye and I've ended with one too long and one too short...which means they're perfect in average :P.  I didn't knew how to tackle the wire cutters and wanted to flatten them with hammer and then pile them to shape. I've used heavy duty paper clips and hammer was used to almost no effect, so I got a better idea. I've cut it a bit rounded at the top and filled the spot with sharpened miliput, to make the cutter. Much less effort and probably even looks better. The bars holding the bumpers are just short paper clip rods. Its all glued with poundland superglue, so they fell off twice in next couple of days. I've now strengthened them with some GS around the joints.

Lastly, I've been working on snorkel for Landie...nothing spectacular but it is a slight conversion so I can call it "my own".

Thanks for looking and I hope I'll have humvees painted by the next post (minus the gunners, that will take a while),
Mathyoo