Scratch Built Titan Pt. 6 (Titans are Disarming)

As I began work on the shoulders of the Titan, it occurred to me that being able to remove the arms would serve a couple of purposes. First, any dis-assembly should improve transport-ability. Second, there are a total of Four weapon arms on offer from the plans I'm working off, so being able to swap arms down the road may be cool as well. But how to accomplish such a feat of magic? With magnets!

I've had some decent size rare earth magnets left over from another project and by sheer luck, I had just the right amount (after one broke in half). Most of this process will be explained in the following pictures. A couple of bits O'knowledge for reference; the shoulder is a large octagon. The arm bit is intended to be glued straight to the bottom of this octagon. The upper arm is different for guns vs fist. Only the upper arm for guns is shown in the pictures. Ok, lets go!

The plan is to put to magnets in each shoulder that will be mirrored in the removable upper arm pieces. After some measuring I found that these magnets can be placed about 1" apart and still fit nicely. I cut some pieces of scrap matte board to 1" to help line up the magnets while they are glued...



Here are the magnets lined up on the shoulder piece. You may notice they are not lined up with the geometry of the shoulder octagon. This is because I don't want the eventual pose to be arms straight at sides. Hopefully this slight angle will allow the arm to have a slight outward twist. How do I keep the magnets in place? With more magnets on the outside (not pictured)!



The next step is to liberally coat the whole inside of the piece with a mess of glue. I make sure to get a lot in the joins of the inside of the shoulder too, for extra strength...



After a few hours it dries strong and clear...



The great thing about this is, I used this first shoulder to line up the magnets in the upper arm, then used that arm to line up the magnets in the other shoulder, then used a shoulder to line up the magnet in the other upper arm.

Here is a shot of a shoulder and upper arm magnetized and in position...



One last thing worth mentioning. I had intended to set the magnets so that both in the shoulder were the same polarity up then both magnets in the upper arms have the opposite polarity up. I messed this up on the first shoulder and one magnet is "north" up and the other is "south" up. However, I decided that this was a happy mistake. My plan for arm removal is to twist the arms moving the magnets away from each other laterally. The poles being opposite doesn't change the holding power but does mean that if I twist too far they will repel instead of locking back together with the arm backwards. Does any of that make sense in words?

As of now I have the shoulders and upper arms magnetized and assembled. There are several more pieces to do on the shoulders so there will be a proper shoulder update later. I may decide to build an arm first to test the magnet strength... not that I can do much about it if it's too weak. Also, leg assembly has begun, or at least leg sub-assembly. I'll have to post an update on that soon too. It starts to look Titan-y when you start putting legs together!

Thanks for stopping by and feel free to leave a comment, question, or haiku.

HiTech Miniatures Product Review "Six Nil Six Factor"

This is a quick(ish) product review I did for a miniature from HiTech Miniatures out of Poland. The miniature is their 28mm ArchFather Six Nil Six Factor. The bulk of the review is a video review as I'm still trying to get better at using my camera. It's really not the camera that needs much improvement though, it's me! You can see some detailed pics of the mini on the HiTech website I've linked to above. You all have the Table Top Fix blog to blame for this review. That blog catches just about every mini from every company known to man and shares it with the blogosphere. After the video I'll post some thoughts, some of which aren't included in the video.



Enjoy!



Pros:
Fast shipping from Europe, less than a week!
Quality sculpt
They included metal pins needed to complete mini
The subject is appealing and reasonably original (my opinion)

Cons:
The checkout process on their website is not user friendly
A few more pin holes than I'd like to see for the price

Overall, I'd say that if you see something on the HiTech website you really like, give them a shot. Just understand that you may be filling a couple pin holes when you get the mini. If you have any specific questions, I'd be happy to answer them.

Back to work on the Scratch Build Titan. The shoulders are in the works right now.

Scratch Built Titan Pt. 5 (That's Church)

Part five of the Scratch Built Titan project brings us to the body of the titan. The body, in this case, being a church. Need help bringing the faith of the Imperium to a backwater planet? Drop a walking church on'em!

There was the printing, the sticking, the cutting, and the pasting. But when it was all done we end up with a collection of parts assembled as shown below...


You may note that there are two pieces in the upper left corner already assembled with a "roof" between them... I got a little ahead of the camera...

The different colored bits you see are made from cereal box material. It's a little thinner and easier to work with than the matte board so it's a great choice for the really fiddly tower bits. After some sub-assembly we end up with a group of three main pieces. The church itself on the top of the body of the titan in the middle of the shot below, the front balcony in the left of the shot, and the rear chapel & balcony on the right...



The above pieces then go together to form the overall structure of the titans body/church. This is not an exact science and much referring to the instructions and a finished example over at Tanks and Trolls was needed before I felt confident enough to glue the pieces together. This step also includes the addition of the head. I'm really not sure it was necessary to add the head at this time, but I went along with the instructions and did so. There is not much in the way of pose-ability with the head, so I don't feel like waiting for the final pose (as I do with man sized minis) would have changed the head's final position. Here are some assorted shots of the titan from the hips up so far...









I'm not sure why I didn't take any shots of the titan from the rear? Maybe the head seemed too pretty? Anyway, that's the progress so far. As I'm building this I'm really tempted to go ahead and assemble the legs. The left to right should balance themselves out reasonably well and I now have pretty much all the front to back assembly done. Which balances itself out nicely as you can see from the shots above, a little front heavy, but only slightly. Details and decoration may change the balance a little, but I can't imagine it will change drastically from where it is now. Besides all that I'm excited to see the legs under this thing!

Please feel free to leave a comment if you like. I'm happy to answer questions, ignore complaints, and hear your thoughts. Thanks for stopping by!