Journey to Midwest Conquest - 2

"Journey to Midwest Conquest" is a blog series by me, Darin, about my preparation for a (friendly) tournament for the miniature war game, Warhammer 40k! The tournament takes place during Memorial Day Weekend (May 22-24th).

In today's blog, I will go over the basics of assembling some of my miniatures! To start with, the miniatures come on a sprue much like this one:

To start assembling, you first have to remove the individual pieces from said sprue. A lot of people use clippers for this, I personally use a tiny little saw

Next, you need to clean up the mold lines and bits of connecting plastic left from the sprue.

Before:

After:

Once all that's done, it's time to start gluing! There is a wide variety of different glues you can use, a lot of people even use just super glue. Personally I always stick to plastic glue, preferably miniature plastic glue if possible, and specifically my favorite stuff to use is this:

Now for the gluing part, you simply apply some glue to one (or both) pieces that need to be attached, and then mash'em together! Like so:

First the legs:

Then torso goes onto legs:

Of course all models are different, but these ones are all infantry (Imperial Guard infantry specifically), and they're pretty simple and straight forward.

Next step is the head (and also base):

and lastly the arms

Now for these infantry (and most infantry in the 40k range), the arms are the most important part, since different arms have different weapons which has the largest effect on WHAT the model is on the table top (mechanically speaking). In this case, he's an officer with a bolt pistol and a chainsword, that's right, it is a chainsaw sword. Welcome to the 41st millennium.

Next weeks blog I'll be going over painting!