Soon after completing Kastrysha / Kshatriya ordered the dual LED gatling gun set from Hobbymate.  Here’s the box of the single gun.But if you order the dual set, you get a fancy box that is nicely metallic and shiny. The pieces all come on standard runners unlike the Kshatriya. Amazingly, almost every piece is under-gated which makes for a very clean finish. The type of plastic used is the same soft plastic as we had on the Kshatriya too, which although not the best, is at least easy to work with. The moulding standard is pretty good, although not perfect. There was some flash to remove and some of the detail was a touch soft. I want to be able to put the guns on the Kshatryia, but also onto the Sazabi, so I went for a non-red and non-green colour scheme, focussing on metallics and neutral colours. For the ammo containers I went with Alclad copper, with Alclad polished brass for the end caps. Here’s a nice closeup of how great the Alclad copper looks. As usual, I used the Alclad glossy black undercoat, which makes for a great base to build the metallic paint up on top, and makes for more economic use of the expensive Alclad metallic paint too! The main body of the guns are pretty simple. You have to make the battery (2x LR41) holder yourself from two plastic parts and three small metal parts that have flaps which bend around to hold themselves in place. A nice pair of pliers comes in handy here! You have to solder the wires from the switch and LED to the batter connectors. The LEDs need their leads cutting leaving just enough end to insert into a connector. There’s no guidance on the correct orientation of the LED, but if you get it wrong either swap the batteries or swap the orientation of the LED going into the connector. These sections form the main part of the arms that will hold the guns. For these, I painted them with Alclad grey primer followed by Createx pearl white. I then went in by hand with Tamiya smoke to fill in the details. I also used Tamiya clear red and blue for the small details of the cables that are moulded into the part. The body of the claws is the same grey / pearl white combination as the arms, and the metallic details are Alclad polished aluminium. The arms have polycaps for the joints, which have to be very stiff to hold the weight of the guns. The polycaps are very very tight to fit in and I had to do a small amount of trimming. The hydraulics come pre-chromed for the piston and I did the rest with Alclad polished aluminium covered with Tamiya clear orange. There was some tricky assembly to put all the pieces together, and the bolts went in well giving needed strength to the build. You’ll need a small allen key for the bolts, which you remembered to keep from when you built Kshatriya, right?  Now because it’s the dual set, you get two sets of arms. One will go on Kshatryia, and I’m hoping to modify the other to go onto Sazabi. The bodies are Tamiya gunmetal, and for the darker sections I mixed some Createx black.Now for the big test – do the LEDs work? And yes they do! Now the guns are really designed to go on the Kshatriya, and to do that, you remove a small hexagonal piece from the back and plug the arms in. Fortunately I was able to get the lights on the mech working, although there were a number of parts that fell off while I was getting it all set up  Here’s some nice detail shots of the 2nd set of arms that I’ll attempt to work onto Sazabi.  Here’s a close view of the connector that joins the arms to the mech.  The copper section allows you to join two guns together. I may give that a go later…Now to see if the binders still fit…. And they do… I’ve got to say I really like the gatling guns. They make the big Kshatriya a bit busy, but they give the hands something to do!

Update: Instructions have been asked for, and as luck would have it, I’ve found them….