Last night I started building an apothecary for my Orc team. Not that he is a doctor that you’d be particularly pleased to be sent to…
For a while now I have been using Tamiya Extra Thin polycement instead of the more traditional glutinous stuff. It is very runny and comes with a fairly precise brush applicator, meaning you tend not to get the splurges of glue and melted plastic “strands” that sometimes happen with thicker cement.
For this conversion I also discovered that you can use it in a couple of other ways.
- Squidge two parts together forming a ridge of melted plastic, then use the brush to gently blend the melted plastic in to the two parts around it. Afterwards, scrape and sand down the join and you end up with a completely invisible (and probably very strong) join. In this way I got the hands and arms of the apothecary (which were all seperate parts) to blend seamlessly together.
- Where my cutting/sanding/smoothing work wasn’t that smooth, I used the cement to smooth out the surface by brushing a small amount on. For example the open hand draped over the knife hilt is a fairly badly cast part in the 40k ork kit I’m using, with the fingers not very well defined. I tried to cut and scrape some definition into the fingers with a scalpel but they were left quite ragged and only an approximation of fingers. A quick smooth with the cement later and extra cement applied and smoothed into the grooves and they were much, much better.
Very useful, versatile stuff for any plastic models, I recommend it.
Next I will need to sculpt an apron to make him more dokterly and then a fun, blood spattered paint job awaits.