so of course i find myself sitting in front of the computer planning to finally glue the arms onto my dark eldar when lazyness strikes and i decide to tackle a project i've been meaning to do for ages. did a bunch of googling in the past but never found a satisfactory way of doing it. i'm sure i just missed it, so no claiming to be original on my part, just what follows is how i went about it ...
basically all i will be using is a sharp craft knife, a small file, lots of 6mmx3mm rare earth magnets (there is no such thing as overkill) and some epoxy to set them nice and tight after i superglue them in.
and of course here is where reality came crashing down and i realised two things : this might not be the best way to go about it and dang i need smaller magnets. but since stubborn is a good thing in 40k i decided to push on through and try and make it work. unfortunely this now involved one heck of a lot of cutting down of the bottom drop pod sections, some small bit manufacoring and casting, lots of swearing and dirty looks from my cat.
lets start with the drop pod doors, as they are the easiest by far to do and the magnets are actually perfect in size for this. the first picture below shows the bits you need to cut off and/or trim down. note you are now cutting off the drop pods hinge pin, so if you're not sure about buggering up your new shiny drop pod, read everything and then decide. my dad always used to say, look 3 times, think 2 times and do once. the second pic below is how it should look after the trimming.
outside done, now lets dig around the inside :) in the first pic below is the unaltered drop pod door piece with little arrows marking the inner lip thinghy. don't worry it serves no practical purpose that i can see, except to keep the magnets from being nice and close to the edge. excise the little tumour and in the second pic below you can see where i've cut it out and the final pic below shows where i've already glued in 2 magnets.
right, for now the doors are as done as i would want them. do not glue them yet, there's making sure the magnets polarity match up with the magnets in the bottom hull, adding some epoxy/greenstuff to more firmly seat the magnets in case they decide to come loose, and finally we'll need to add a magnet to the top part of the door so it properly closes. moving on to the bottom hull sections
i won't lie, this part is pure make it up as i go along, required way too much carving of the hull sections and took up the most of the time spent doing things. pic 1 and 3 below shows how much i carved out when you compare it to the pristine parts. this was all in aid of being able to seat the magnets as high up and therefore close as possible to where they would align best to the magnets in the doors. at first i tried to place the magnets in each of the 5 points so they repulsed each other, thereby "pushing" them closer to the door magnets but this was just plain silly. as the magnets are too strong i had to finally make some resin plugs to put in each point (pic 2 below). not too much of a hassle but i could have achieved the same in much less time with a well cut section of leftover sprue i think. anycase, i went the long difficult route, and i couldn't find my 6 mm drillbit to add to my woes. finally all the nits are done, glued into place and now its just a matter of some (lots) of trimming of the resin bits to make the top part of the hull fit on the bottom part again. for now also i will not be gluing the top and bottom together, more magnets to come i hope.
end of part one for now, part 2 will start with a pic of where you should be after these steps
