Assembling the Bofors Like all the Anti-aircraft guns the bofors is a precision piece of kit, and Karl our gun designer has done an outstanding job of replicating it. Because it has a few more parts than most of our guns I thought I would take you through the process of assembling one, as well as offering a few tips on how to make your painting and basing jobs easier later.

Step 1 One of the things I do with non-wheeled guns (usually guns mounted on a turntable with a 360° firing arc) is to place a spacer between them and the base. The purpose of this is to raise the gun to the level of the filler I’ll be texturing the base with later. In this case I’ve just used the blister card that came with the gun, cut into a cross shape to roughly match the legs of the gun trail. I also use the left over blister card to mount my crews and infantry for painting.

Step 2 Next I glue the card to the plastic base. You can use whatever glue you normally use to assemble you miniatures, in my case I just use some super glue gel. With the bofors you get two legs and a central mounting with the legs attached, once cleaned up it is a simple matter of gluing the two legs in position at 90° angles to the central mounting. Once dry glue the legs to the card cross.

Rather than glue the whole gun together I’ve decide to paint the base legs separate from the main body of the gun for ease of access with the paintbrush. Step 3 Now its time to glue the rest of the gun together. The first two parts are the gun mounting and the footplate. The gun mounting fits from underneath the footplate with the mount arms pointing away from the recoil mechanism (the piston things).

Step 4 Next we add the gun shield. This is an optional piece many variants of the bofors didn’t have them or the crews simply removed them when they got in the way. I’ve chosen to have mine with the shield. Tip: You may have to bend the shield towards the gun breach a little to leave room for the gun sight. The shield fits along the front of the footplate piece under the overhanging recoil mechanism.

Step 5 The gun glues to the mounting arms, the pins fitting into the slots at the end of the arms. If you haven’t lined your shield up now is a good time to do it, just make sure the shield is bent back to just behind the join between the barrel and the breach block.

Step 6 You can either glue the seated gunners now, as I have, or glue them on later after you have painted them. I have chosen to glue them on now, as I don’t think it will be too hard to paint them on the gun There is no hard and fast rule I use to decide whether to glue crew on before painting or not, I make a judgement based on each model.

Step 7 Next to go on is the tailpiece; this fits in a slot on the footplate to the rear of the gun.

The final part is the sight group, this glues to the front of the guns breech block (the square part of the gun), the arms at the each end of the bar alight horizontally with the gun barrel. There is a section cut in the centre of the sight to enable easy alignment with the breech block. That’s the main body of the gun finished. Tip: Rather than try and hang on to the body of the gun while painting I painted the bottom of the gun body before gluing it to a piece of card for the rest of the painting.

Step 8 The final bit of assembly is the trail axles and wheels, simply glue the wheels to the axles.

These can be painted up along with the ammo boxes as extra decoration for the finished gun team.