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Tuesday, May 14, 2019

World War II Project - Perry Miniatures US Infantry Squad Build

I started assembling the box of US Infantry. Getting the first squad together was a bit frustrating. While there is a nice sheet detailing what's on the weapons sprue, there is no such sheet for the regular sprue and nothing is numbered. The reality is that while the box has enough figures for a complete platoon I think it might take a little more than that. I accidentally managed to build two BAR gunners for the first squad and lost a left arm. I have searched the entire floor and nothing so far. It was the classic drop piece, hear it hit the hardwood floor and bounce and have no idea which way it went.

I discovered that not all of the arms will fit all of the bodies, so when I get to the second squad I'm going to need to make some notes on what fits to what and what doesn't fit. I might also take a slightly different approach to the whole build, which will make having two boxes quite handy. Since I'm using the TOEs from Chain of Command some of the support weapons need a lot of miniatures, the bulk of the second box may well go towards creating these weapon teams. Anyway here are the results of the first build:

There are a couple of things that I don't like about  the composition of the box. On the main infantry sprue there are two men prone and two kneeling. That makes for some flexibility with the support weapon mix as these figures do double duty as crew for the .30 cal MG and the Bazooka. I don't find them as useful though when just building a straight up squad.



For the bazooka team I used one of the kneeling figures from the main sprue and the other from the weapon sprue.


And there are far to many legs to glue on. Both of these require a leg to be glued in place and I found that patience is required and the glue needs to fully set or the leg will slip out of position. I highly recommend either the Testor's Model Master liquid cement for this or Plastruct Plastic Weld. They both setup fast. I don't recommend super glue, you need to be able to slide the parts around a bit and super glue isn't going to let  you do that and eventually the bond will break. These are plastic use glues made for plastic!

The figure on the left is from the weapon sprue and the arms and M1 Garand are a single piece. He is going to need a little filler at the shoulders.

The prone figures, there are no options for the arms on these. Everyone one of these is going to look alike so be prepared to add extra pouches and the backpacks to make them different.


The other split leg figure on the right. I need to go back to this one as it looks like it slipped a bit before the glue had fully set.


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