Painting and putting together minis

[deltadave]

Now dont confuse the guy. Your not putting together huge models so you dont need J.B. weld or Epoxy. As far as giving your minis a bath and handling them with cotton gloves I hope he was kidding, just clean the flashing off and any other extra metal to "clean" your figures. (heck Ive even used my finger nail when the fig wasnt too bad) Just stick with one or two light coats of primer, use acrylic paint (99.99% of which painters use) and youll be fine.

Removing the flash is done before washing, since you have to handle the figure extensively while filing and clipping and wearing cotton gloves while doing this stuff is a pain.

If you don't wash the oils off, the paint doesn't stick right and tends to flake off. the primer needs a clean surface to stick to... if you don't want to use soap and water, try acetone (for metal minis only!) or alcohol.

BTW - acetone melts any kind of plastic into a little puddle of goo, so unless that is what you are after avoid it for your plastic or resin figures.

Disclaimer - I'm a fanatic about this kind of stuff since I use oil paints and they tend to be sensitive to poor priming. Nothing like having a fig that you have spent many hours painting have all the paint flake off over the course of a week or 2.

 

[kenobi65]

FYI cleaning refers to taking off flashing and other bits of left over lead / pewter etc...and cleaning the seams.

Well, that, too...but I'm talking about soap and water, just to make sure you're getting any of your fingerprints, or anything funky that might have gotten on the mini during casting, *off* of the mini. Anything oily (like fingerprints) may hamper the primer's ability to stick to the metal.

 

[AuraSeer]

I try to stay away from superglue (cyanoacrylate). It's the easiest to use, but I find it to be very brittle. When a figure is constantly being picked up and knocked over and shoved around the battlemat, the superglue tends to crack, and over time you end up having pieces fall off.

Instead I mostly use Duco Cement (which I believe is nitrocellulose-based). It cures to a more "rubbery" consistency, so the joints can give slightly when stressed. Figures I've glued with Duco have held up a lot better over time, and none of them have suffered embarrassing self-amputation during battle.

JB Weld (a two-part epoxy) is even better, but it's kind of fiddly to work with. You needn't bother with it unless you're gluing a very big joint, or something that needs to support weight.

For plastic figures, model cement is the only way to go. It actually melts the two pieces of plastic and welds them into one piece, which makes for a much stronger bond than ordinary glue. Too bad it's utterly useless on metal.