The past few nights I have been getting the Juan Diaz Daemonettes ready for priming. If you know these models you'll know that they are metal and two piece - body and an arm. As with all metals that are going to be used for gaming pinning of the joints is desirable. With these models that creates real issues as the figures are very very petite with arms having a diameter of less than 1.0-1.5mm.
When I pin I use paperclips as the pin and my drill bit is around 0.7mm. This creates all sorts of difficulties - particularly how far you can get into the "arm" piece given the sculptured form. I aim for around 1.0mm.
Pinning 80 of these daemonettes over the past few evenings let me develop some helpful tips. The most important of these was the use of liquid green stuff.
The first thing I did was remove the very short pre-cast nub on the arm (this was insufficient to hold the arm for gaming use. I then would file the joining surface on the arm flat and drill a hole for the pin. This is fiddly as given the size of the piece and a 0.7mm hole there is little room for mistakes. Finally I would superglue in the paperclip pin.
Turning attention to the torso there is a pre-cast hole. This is too shallow and too wide. First I would drill the hole deeper. The problem was that if you just now glued the pin in it was very loose - -due to the cast width and difficult to position. So I would place a drop of glue on the protruding pin and then using a matchstick would put liquid green stuff in the body hole. The pinned arm would then be placed and put in the correct position. The inclusion of Green Stuff gives extra rigidity and solidity to the bond.
This allowed me to fly through the models and tonight I'm planning to prime the "army".
Brilliant idea! I've often struggled with the difference in size between the paper clip and the drill hole. Will definitely be giving this a whirl. Cheers.
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