S range Help to identify Will - S range Officer with binoculars

In a blog on the Hinton Spieler the excellent 'Dust Up at Dapol' the Prussian Artillery commander orders his men to 'Fire at Will'.  The gunners ask  'Which one is Will?'.  A fair question, and on a crowded battlefield the more help the better to help locate him. 

So with my trusty scapal and a lot of work I have deployed a Prussian FPW officer with binoculars to try to help.This is how I did it.

As you and I know I am not very good with 'green stuff', so had to try to find some arms holding binoculars some other way.  Nothing out there with binoculars, so I looked at the S range FPW artillery figure holding a shell. 

I thought if I could get the arms away from the body I could file the point of the shell and paint it to look like binoculars.  This was very difficult and took forever.  Eventually, I managed to separate the arms.  I filed the point off the shell and made two small drill points which looked like the lenses of binoculars.  At this point I was pretty pleased with myself.

Now how to fit them to the body of the Prussian FPW Mounted Officer?  I cut away the officers arms and offered up the gunners arms to see how they would fit.  They needed to be opened up a bit, but couldn't just be stuck on.  So I put pins each side of the Officers body and drilled holes in the arms.

All was going well until I tried to open the arms a little wider to go over the new pins. SNAP! the arms split and one went flying across the room to disappear into the deepest recesses of the carpet.  No amount of crawling about on the floor could reveal it.  I simply couldn't face the FPW figure again to get a new pair of arms.  So I had another look and realised that the arms of the British Crimean War gunner with ball have less 'fixing' them to the body as they are set slightly away from the torso.

Not the best picture but there is clear space between each arm and the body on the British gunner, so less to cut away.

 As a result these were much, much easier to remove, taking a fraction of the time.  The arms were also slightly wider apart to start with making fixing to the pins on the generals body much more simple, although they still needed to be opened a little.  Some filing and rubbing down with sandpaper and job done.  Mind you all he can see is the horses mane!  Will is definitely not hiding in there!

This took about and hour, most of which was spent getting the arms off the FPW gunner with shell which eventually I couldn't use and crawling around the floor looking for a tiny shard of metal!.  If I was EVER to try this again, I think I would I use the same British gunner but just use one arm, so the Officer is holding the binoculars in one hand.  This would make the removal from the body much simpler and also mean that I only had to remove one arm from the receiving general's body.

I had to press a Warrior 25mm horse into action as I didn't have any S Range horses readily available.

Just a bit of nonsense really!