Scratchbuild: Freeboota Cannon Mount

As I mentioned in my last post, my fourth Battlewagon has a rear-mounted cannon:

However, for the first three Battlewagons I built, I used these cannons:

...the problem was, I bought a set of three of the above cannons on eBay - they arrived in a plastic bag, with no indication of what manufacturer or game system they came from.  On top of that, it was an overseas seller - it could have been any number of tiny hobbyist-run companies, or even an amateur casting.  (The amount of flash certainly supports that).  Regardless, no more of these appeared to be showing up on eBay.  Luckily, a quick search of the Reaper store showed cannons available.  I must have been broke the week I placed my order, because for some reason I bought just the cannon barrels, and not the carriages:

...so, I needed to come up with a way to mount them in my Battlewagons.  While I was thinking about it, I went ahead and drilled out the barrels:

...then I chopped out a rectangle of plasticard, roughly the size & shape of the carriage I needed:

Then I cut some rectangular styrene tube to the same length as the platform:

...and glued them to the platform:

Then I cut some smaller lengths of rectangular tubing:

...and glued them to the opposite side of the platform.  To make a support for the cannon to sit at the proper angle, I roughly measured & cut a piece of tubing:

To get the cannon barrel ready to mount, I trimmed off the mounting tabs:

Then I cut a small notch for the barrel to sit in:

After I glued the barrel in place, I traced the shape of the outside of the mount onto some plasticard:

...and glued it on the front to close up the open ends:

Then I trimmed out the shape:

To make the platform appear like it had a bit more bulk, I cut another piece of tubing and glued it in place:

Next I got out my bag of rivets:

...and glued some on the front:

...to get the carriage to sit flat, I shaved off the molded rivets on the floor of the Battlewagon:

...and glued it down:

...and that's it.  Ideally it would have had enough of the first style of cannon to complete all my Battlewagons, but since I've giving each one unique touches (different emblems, Deffrollas, etc.) It doesn't bother me terribly that two of them will be different.  I also bought a few extra cannon barrels - maybe I'll give my Trukks a custom cannon too...