The Hard Work Begins

The Queen's Rangers getting prepared for assembly

As you can see in the picture, I’m in the process of preparing heads for attachment. I decided to do all the heads at one time since there are so many. All of the Queens Rangers need heads! So doing them all in one fell swoop saves time and effort mixing putty and drilling, etc. The Army-in-a-box only needs the lights and the general too. I thought about it for a long time and the method that I’m going to use involves several steps, albeit easy ones:

1. Clip excess sprue from the bottom of the neck.

2. File flat and make locating dimple in center with the point of an X-acto knife
3. Drill hole in neck of head and superglue in length of cheap floral wire.
4. Drill larger hole in neck depression of torso.
5. Use small ball of epoxy putty to attach head to body.

Note that the lights, because of their firing positions, will not have their heads attached until after painting (but before Army Shade is applied). This allows me to tilt the head over the rifle so that they will appear to aiming (which will make them roll better, no doubt).

I’m going to pin the arms too, I’ll drill straight through the arm and put a pin into it, filing the end of the pin smooth with outside of the arm. The torso gets a much bigger hole and gets a ball of epoxy putty into which the pin gets set. All the arms (engigns, cavalry, and generals) will get attached before painting.

Last in the assembly process is to pin the horse to bases and the riders to horses. A pin gets super-glued into the bottom horses legs and the bases get receiving holes. I thought about not using the cast bases at all and just attaching the horses to the Litko bases. However, I think that will leave the mounted figure way too top heavy so I’ll use them.

Speaking of basing. The highlander bases are 1.5” long! Damn, I’m going to have to cut those thick bases back. Fortunately, the stance of the figures is such that they will fit on 1.25” bases once I do that. Cutting and filing those bases back is going to be a major pain. I guess I’ll have to that before I attach the heads too.

 

(The highlander bases do not have to trimmed as I think that they will fit diagonally on a 1.25" square base as is. However, I decided to trim them so the figures will look more intimidating marching straight ahead with bayonets leveled...no doubt this will improve their melee rolls...)

 

Anyhow, the goal is to have the figures primed on Wednesday. That means that I have to get them assembled by Tuesday to have time for glue to dry. This is my goal so that I can start painting over the Thanksgiving weekend.