Morgan Vade - Assembly

The first miniature we're going to look at is Morgan Vade - one of the Vanguard characters found in bag 1.

Morgan comes in five pieces, plus the base - body, head, arm with bag, arm with pistol, las carbine.

The first thing to do, as with any of the miniatures, is to clean the pieces. This means removing the mould lines (the lines on the miniatures where the two halves of the mould meet), and any injection marks (the place where the plastic is injected into the mould cavity). The best way to do this is to carefully cut them away with a sharp craft-knife blade. Because of the nature of the plastic used, it's hard to get a smooth finish with a file - the plastic has a tendency to 'tear'.

Once the pieces are clean, you can assemble them. We recommend you use 'super-glue' (Cyanoacrylate glue), plastic cement glues won't work correctly as they are designed for a different type of plastic. The first thing I did was to attach the body to the base - (mainly so it would be easier to photograph for this article) but you can do that once all the pieces are glued together if you like. To make sure the miniature has a strong bond with the base, I smoothed off the underside of the feet with a emery board (home made in this case, but the ones you can buy are just as good) - this tears the surface very slightly, but as it's where the miniature attaches to the base - that doesn't matter.

It's important to make sure the first bond is dry before moving onto the next - otherwise the pieces will have a tendency to come apart again. You can speed up the drying with an accelerator (usually a spray), or by either using a hair drier or simply breathing on them (don't get too close!).

After that, it simply a case of attaching one component after another until the miniature is complete.

That's it - the miniature is ready for priming and painting. In some cases (especially with the larger miniatures), there may be some gaps to fill between pieces, but we will look at that in another article.

mike