Sunday, April 5, 2015

Armada : First X-Wing painted and laser canons pin tutorial

Hello everyone,

I just got my copy of Armada last week and I could not wait to see what I could do with the fighters.


At around 14 mm long the X-Wings are about 1/3rd the size of X-Wing miniatures X-Wings and of course much less detailed. However with a bit of detailing and freehand you can get a pretty convincing result.





To start I did not like the stubby canons on the stock models so I decided to replace them with pins.
Image taken from Lurtz tutorial on ffg forums
First I cut the barrels of the canons at the base, cleaning the model to get a nice flat surface. My pins are 0.6mm in diameter so I needed to carefully drill a hole in each gun mount to get a solid fit.


I tried with several small hobby drills (from 0.5mm  to 0.7mm) but could not get good results (the head did not bite) until I switched to my best small drill which is 0.8mm in diameter. This is the largest you will be able to use on the gun mounts.

I drilled in 2 passes, first a small guide hole:

then I came back and drilled about 2 mm.

Finally  I cut the pins to size. You want the guns to extend about 5 mm, so you need about 7 mm of pin.



Now repeat for 12 X-Wings :)



Of course for my first model had to be Red 5, Luke Skywalker fighter in A New Hope as I already painted it for X-Wing. Sorry for pictures, but it's really hard to photograph such small models!







While painting I needed something to hold the models so I took several plastic q-tips, cut one end and widened the hole to the diameter of the stand plug on the models:



Hope you enjoyed this article, stay tuned for more Star Wars goodness soon (who said anything about a Star Destroyer ?) .

Time to reload,
Ica

8 comments:

  1. Exquisite detail. My only problem would be replacing the guns with pins. I would end up stabbing myself repeatedly with them.

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  2. I can't even....This is amazing. Props to you sir! I'm with Kelly here. I'd be in the emergency room. I have issues just drilling space marine arms!

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  3. Please please please write up a tutorial on how you painted these!

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  4. Thanks guys, tutorial on the way.

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    Replies
    1. Any update on that tutorial? I tried my hand at painting but I can't find a small enough brush

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  5. Hello Capt DDS, I posted a tutorial: http://www.rule37.net/2015/04/armada-tutorial-painting-red-squadron-x.html

    I'm mostly using a size 1 from the 8404 series of brush by Raphael.

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