1st & 2nd Tacticals: Assembly

Finally getting these all assembled and together... extra detail after jump on how these have come together and some OCD parts management.

I assemble the body + legs, then drill & pin the weapon arms so that the bolter can be painted separately and slipped into place later, thereby allowing the chest & detail to be painted with easier access than weapon attached. This was even more annoying for the heavy weapons - the heavy bolter has to line up with with both arm joints, backpack and 2 points where the belt feed connects.  

I then drill into the legs and add paperclip pins to the base so that the base/mini can be painted separately and assembled at the very end, which should make highlighting feet much easier. In hindsight, it probably would have been much easier to just drill and pin at the very end, rather than supergluing and trimming the pins beforehand.

Note the somewhat OCD layout of the reference number on paper. Since each mini now has an individually matched 'unique' base... having 20 of these floating around without some way of keeping track is an issue, hence the ID. 

Wanting to keeping the tactical squads, well... tactical (ie, flexible)... I built the sergeant arms with tiny magnets in the shoulders so these could be switched out later on for different loadouts (assuming I make some spares). The heavy weapon and specialist were also intentionally made with the non-knee guard legs so that they don't carry the squad marking and can therefore be switched between squads if I ever want to mix them around. 

As one extra touch of genius - the sergeant bases now have a tiny magnet in the surface so that a meltabomb (also magnetised) can be added or removed to designate their 5pts in game. Can just see one of these on the base in the top left. In hindsight, since I could be running 5-man squads (demi-company) I probably should have added these to the 'corporal' mini as well, but you can't have everything...

Tactical squad 1: plasma gun specialist and heavy bolter. The heavy bolter uses the feed from the devastator sprue rather than BA tac kit. And of course gets the little bit of scenery from that sprue that looks like a bunch of empty shell casings. 

Tactical squad 2: FIRE, BURN, KILL. Flamer specialist, flamer pistol for the sergeant and the awesome heavy flamer. The sergeant banner for this squad has the little square patch on the top corner - think this squad will probably suit designation of squad #3... red drop on yellow... which would fit nicely. 

The other challenge with the approach to these so far - bases. 

I had these kits before the sector imperialis package came out, and am stubbornly using the black bases with bits of stuff added, but the time taken to clip up bits of sprue, plasticard, mesh, old bits of kit... and then wood-glue coffee (yep - coffee... finer than sand) as the texture layer adds quite a bit of time. 

Note for beginners... this is probably not the best way to assemble troops. Certainly not for buliding troops quickly and easily. 

Mass airbrushing to follow.