Varangian, moving pistons, WIP

One of the large uncertainties of my Warlord build has been how to do the arms so that they can be posed and removed for transport. I could not do it the same way as I did for the Reaver, with a screw going from the top into the arm as the Warlord has the shoulder mounted weapons siting on top of the arm socket. One other thing that differs is that the Warlord has two pitons going from the main body to the arm. For the Reaver I skipped some of the cables between the arms and the body to make the arms removable but these pistons are also such an visible part of the arm assembly for the Warlord so I did not want to lose them. So for the mounting and positioning I used some heavy duty magnets that should hold the arm in the socket. That did however leave the pistons. This has been bothering me for some time, how to do it, and it has been one of the reasons I have stalled with this part of the build. One idea that I had was to manufacture some "claws", like on the Defiler kit, that would hold the ball in the sockets for the pistons and hence allow me to have one part attached to the body and one to the arm. I tried this and it sort of works, but the claws really limits the motion and they are quite fragile. Another idea that I have been playing around with in my head is to actually make working pistons by having them spring loaded so that they actually presses against the seats in the arm and body. So I tried this and it works beautifully. I did however makes some initial mistakes. I did not check how deep the recesses in the piston body was compared to the body which lead me to cut down the pistons so that they fit with approximately the angle I wanted. However the range of motion was to short. After measuring the recess in the piston body I realized that I could drill them out, making them deeper which meant more motion to the pistons. Once this was sorted I used the spring from two ball point pens to test it all out. These are just test springs at the moment, once I have the real ones I will cut them to length to maximize the stroke. But already now I can turn the arm quite a lot. The spring force is also enough to hold the hole piston in place with out the claws so I will remove the ones I put on and just just the springs to hold everything in place.