Assembling Models

When buying a unit for your army, if it is plastic it will come on a plastic frame (or sprue) similar to this:

The pieces on the frame must individually be clipped off and then assembled with either super glue or a plastic welding material.  I personally prefer the Plastruct line of products as they actually fuse the two pieces of plastic you wish to bond together, and also can be removed easily if improperly positioned. The company even makes a non-toxic version if you don't mind waiting a bit longer for it to dry.

However if your model is made of metal it will likely come in a significantly smaller number of pieces and must be assembled with a hard super glue and a modeling hand drill.

The first thing I do with my model if possible is glue it's legs to the base and work from the bottom up. This allows you to map out the mini from the ground up and can lead to a much smaller number of miniatures that you find yourself unhappy with. Gluing with plastic weld is easily, and only needs to be held for a short period of time before it sets.

Once the miniatures are built you will need to check them for places where they have lines leftover from the casting process, as well as smoothing over the places where the frame met the model. This leftover plastic called a "mold lines" and needs to be removed before going any further. Nothing ruins a great paint job like ugly pieces of plastic sticking out from the model.

Here is an example of a Tau Stealthsuit Team I built recently.

For these models I used plastic weld, and worked from the bottom up.

Next time we will cover flocking and priming your models.