Multi Part Minis

[ChemicalFencer]

Hi all,

I have a metal mountain now (which the wife has stated as being grounds for divorce) so I have to start and finish some of them before she'll let me get more.

So I have picked up 2 54 mm minis to work on. One is Victor Cat Helsing from ToW and the other is 'Alien Commander' from Papah - both rather nice, clean minis. The problem I have is that they are multi part and if I glue their arms to the body etc., then they become difficult to paint. There is some filling that needs to be done on both, so they do need to be put together first.

How do others get around this? Do you paint the parts under the hidden areas first, then put the arms on, fill then carry on? Do you fit everything together, inc adding putty where needed, then take apart, paint and reassemble?

Any suggestions would be great.

TTFN

CF

 

[Hendarion]

So far I always tried to drill tiny wholes to stick them together (whats the english word for that? in german its called "stiften"), so they can losely hold together without gluing. Then I filled the gaps with some milliput, let it harden, then pulled them in parts again, painted everything and in the end glued it together. I have some minis though where that will be really tricky, since the gaps are hard to reach and hard to fill with milliput, but easy to see and some where it is technically not possible to disassemble again after filling the gaps. I don't know yet what to do with those.
Would be interesting to know if there is some easy work-around or how other people handle that trouble.

 

[Eggroll]

My process is usually assemble as many parts as I can without having areas with unreachable sections. This means if there's an arm with a shield that gets attached to a torso and attaching it to the torso means I can't paint the back of the shield, I'll leave the arm and shield off till the inaccessible areas have been painted. However, I'll still clean, de-mold and drill out all my pinning holes first. Then when I prime the mini, I always stick of apeice of blue tack (poster gum) to the contact area of the parts to be glued after so the primer won't be on that section. This way, when I glue the arm back to the torso afterwards, the glue will be on the actual metal surface instead of primer. Always make sure to dry fit and there's huge gaps, I'll use milliput to create a dry fit seal on one of the pieces so when gluing it after painting, there won't be any gaps. Trying to gap fill after a model has been primed and painted is too much of a hassle in my opinion.