Hello to all of you out there in internet land! This article is to give a very basic overview of how to put together one of our models. The goal of this is to give people some help if they have literally never put a model togehter before. I know for many of you this will be somewhat obvious stuff, but we can all use a chance to brush up on the basics now and then. I will be putting Iosara, who hasn’t been released yet, together. This way veterans who have already put together many a model have a reason to check out the pics.

Step 1, Gather Tools and Materials

At the very least you are going to need some super glue to stick all of the parts of the model together. I would suggest also getting a round file, flat file, curved file, hobby knife, clippers, and possibly some tweezers. As pictured here …

Then I normally open up the package and lay out all of the pieces of the model

Step 2, Clean Pieces

First off you want to clean up the base, normally there is some plastic tabbing left over from where the base came off the plastic sprue …

After filing it off with either the round or curved file it should look something like this …

Now that the base is ready to go we will move on to cleaning the body piece, most metal pieces will have some small amounts of extra metal attached to them due to imperfections introduced through the casting and molding process that are not part of the actual figure, these leftovers are called flash and we want to remove them as they obscures detail and break up the lines of the miniature …

Here is the same piece after cleaning

The left arm before cleaning

and after cleaning

The right arm before cleaning

and after cleaning

The scabbards before cleaning

and after cleaning

Step 3, Assembly

Now that we have prepared all of the pieces, we can get to the fun part and start gluing them all together.  A quick word about glue. No matter what type of super glue you are using there is a correct amount of glue to use. To much glue will take a long time to set up and tends to put a spacer of glue between the two pieces. When this happens each piece is supported by the glue rather than being held together by the glue with its weight supported by the other piece. This leads to a bond that is less strong and less able to hold up to wear and tear. To little glue and there will not be enough glue to completely bond the two pieces together. Normally less is better than a lot. The less glue you can use to get the two pieces to stick together the better. Also, the less times you have to move and or reset the pieces while you are trying to get them to bond together the better. It is best to have a very clear idea of how you want the two pieces to fit together, try some dry runs of putting them together to see how they fit and how you will want them posed before getting the glue involved. I would recommend allowing pieces some time to sit and set up once you have gotten them together before you start trying to stick on other pieces, say 15 minutes. This way you are less likely to bump and knock apart your previous work.

First glue the body to the base

After letting that dry, glue the left arm to the body

After letting that dry, glue on the right arm

Again after a few minutes for drying, glue on the scabbards

After you have let all of that dry for awhile you have an assembled model, ready to go to paint!

Where you may (or may not, if your me) be able to do something like this …

Thanks for reading, I hope some of my pointers are helpful. Feel free to add other useful modeling tips that you have found to work for you below in the comments.