The Roco number Z-105 Grille 88mm anti-aircraft gun was a model of a vehicle that only saw a few manufactured. Roco seems to have made millions of them since every old collection seems to have vast numbers of them!
The good news is that the few that were made in real life actually probably did see combat in WWII, there is also a second version that had the standard 88mm gun and front shield in case you wanted to convert this version into a new vehicle.
Panzer Selbstfahrlafette IV Ausf. C, or Pz. Sfl. IVc. or Grille was not common, however the cannon in this model was widely used, the 8.8 cm Flak 41 had over 500 of them produced. Most in a easy to build ground mount.
I took a couple of plastic coffee stir sticks that have been in my spares box for 20 years and used them to make the outriggers. My friend COL Jim gave them to me.
Take apart the Roco Grille model and cut out flat plastic to the front and rear of the mounting plate. You get the dark green part shown above.
I then cut about a one inch long piece of the coffee stir stick to make the outrigger. Cut off the four corners of the green base and glue a small bit of scrap plastic to the underside of each corner. Glue the stir stick to each corner, as shown above.
I drilled a small hole through the far ends of the stir sticks and through a small square of plastic. I then stuck a short bit of wire through the hole and glued it with a mix of super glue and plastic model glue.
The stir sticks came from a major food retailer, I suspect they no longer use these but any bit of sheet plastic or flat plastic rod would do. I had about 20 of these vehicles in my collection and so needed to figure out something to do with them. Most were missing pieces of the fold down sides and other parts. By combining parts from several vehicles I was able to create a reasonable unit of these.
After I individually hand crafted the first few of these guns, I entered into mass production as seen here. I switched up the manufacturing technique but the parts were the same, just assembled in a different order.
Here are the base plates with the outriggers. While I did not make the outriggers to a specific prototypical length, or width, or height, I did make sure the were the same as each other. Mostly. The idea was to create a usable wargame piece out of an otherwise unusable model. I also covered the bottom of the base plate with white plastic. As you can see many of the original Grille kits were previously painted with differing levels of quality. I will post more as I continue the project but this should be enough to get you started.
Thanks for reading.
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Mike Bunkermeister Creek