Magnetised Bullgryns for Kill Team

So, to start I felt that I didn’t have a great idea on how much surface area I had to work with in connecting the arms to the bodies of these miniatures. To solve this, I filled the cavities of the arms with blu tack (poster tack to much of the rest of the world) and shoved them down onto the body to create a relief of the surface area I have to work with and I was surprised to find how much I had.
This gave me the confidence to go ahead and start setting the magnets into the bodies.

This part I wanted to be neat and tidy and get the magnet as close to the centre as I could make it. I figured that this would give me the most give in marrying up both arm options when it comes time to set them.

To achieve that, I stared by picking out a pilot hole using a hand drill and a 0.6mm bit. I then worked my way up through 1.6mm, 2mm and then a pair of 3mm bits (seen below, the left hand one is good for boring into plastic and the right hand one is good for rounding off the hole) to leave me with a recess I could seat the magnet in.

To fix the magnets in I created two blobs of milliput, one slightly larger than the other. The smaller one went on the end of the magnet going into the hole and had the magnet shoved on top of it to fill any space left in the recess and the large on drop onto the magnet and spread down over it.
I was less careful with this step as I figured I wanted a good solid fix for the magnet and could always comes back and trim any excess with a tool once I could dry them.

And that’s that step done.

But wait, for there is more.

Throughout this process I kept dwelling on the cavities that the arms have, where I intend to sit the next set of magnets. There is a fair bit of material that is concave to the space. This is useful when glueing the part as it is contoured to the body but here, it is excess material. So I decided to get rid of it.

Nothing subtle about this step. A hobby knife, a hand drill and file and I just set to carving out material in order to widen the space and give me more room to work with in the next step.

Speaking of the next step, that’s it till the milliput dries. I am discovering that magnetising work can require some lead time due to needing to wait for the medium to set between steps.

Perhaps that is moral of the project.