 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video and today we're going to talk about your ultimate guide to assembling miniatures. Oftentimes we get a sprue, it looks like this, we open our book, we see that there's all these little pieces, we've got to cut out, but where do we begin? Well the first thing I like to do is just look at the sprue, find the various pieces for the fig, and then start making a plan as always, and in this video we're going to take you through everything. So let's start with clippers. So I have two kinds here, the first is traditional clippers on the left with the red handles, and the other are nippers, smaller sharper ones. Clippers the important part is when you get them they need to have a flat bottom, so they rest completely flat against whatever you're cutting. Nippers also have a flat bottom, these happen to be from Tamiya, but what you get with these is a much more precise cut. You can see sort of the size of the thing, the size of the blade, its cutting edge, you can get a lot closer and be a lot more precise with nippers. Now if you're just starting out, any set of clippers you go by with a flat back from the hardware store are going to work just fine for you, and you don't need to eventually upgrade to some kind of god hand clippers for $60 or anything, but I would say that investing in a nice set of nippers is a good investment. Now when I'm cutting away the fig, especially with my nippers because they're so precise I just rest it up against the piece and then softly squeeze to cut it off. You're going to get a little bit of plastic overflow on there, and that's alright. Don't try to make it absolutely perfect, don't worry if it's not completely flush, you can clean it up in the next step. It's better to have a little bit of extra flash still on the miniature piece than it is to cut away and cut part of the miniature you're going to need off. So with it cut off, there you go. Get yourself a good set of clippers, you're good. Now let's talk about Xacto knives. So these are pretty important. You're going to need some kind of sharp blade. Now I use a standard scalpel bottom, but you can also find more of a hobby tool like this. My strong recommendation right out of the gate is do not pay hobby store prices for Xacto blades. You can find these in bulk in medical supply off of eBay and other such places. You will get thousands that you normally pay for the same price as you can get 10 from a hobby store. When you're working with the Xacto against the miniature, one thing you always hear is don't cut towards your thumb. I cut towards my thumb, I'm going to be honest with you, I can't cut away. I don't find it as accurate, but do not try to cut a massive piece. If you've got a big chunk, go back to your clippers or your nippers, work it down slowly or just slowly cut down small pieces. If you take out a big piece and it jumps, that's how you get it into your finger. You notice also how close the rest of my thumb is. Finally after I get the major piece off, I then scrape. You'll notice I tilt the blade and pull towards me. So scraping with the blade tilted and towards me. That prevents you from getting the miniature in a place where it starts to creep up or get rough. You can also use tiny little Xacto blades like this, which you can order from specialty stores for final cleanup. So files. After you've cut the pieces off with your Xacto knife, by the way I should state, never try to remove things from the sprue with an Xacto knife, that is a great way to break a blade and to cut your thumb. You need a nice file. You can get these in lots of different sizes, metal, soft, anything like that. Yet again, you can order them from hobby stores or in bulk, but most of the time any file will sort of do. You can also just get regular sandpaper from something like the auto supply store and that actually is a way cheaper way to get very high grit, thousand grit sandpaper. But once you have the bulk of the material removed with your Xacto knife, you get your sand in there and you just sand it down. If in the middle of you sanding it, you notice, hey, there's still a little bit of a line here, then you sand again. The Xacto knife is used to remove the majority of both extra flash as well as mold lines or the extra little risen lines from where the two pieces of the mold pushed together when the fig was cast. But the file is how you smooth it down. I like high grit files, so things that are very fine. Something in the 200, 400, 800, or 1000 range is generally how you're going to want to finish things off. If you want them to be nice, clean, and smooth, don't try to sand all at once. Just work the piece through and once it's done, you're good to go. Now let's talk about glue. When we're dealing with plastic miniatures, I like plastic cement. There's lots of different brands, but my traditional has always been Tamiya. With Tamiya, you can make Spirugoo. Save that. We'll come back to it later. But when it comes to assembling figs like this, where they kind of slot together and there's a very clean, obvious line, plastic glue is your friend. We're going to talk about other glues in a moment, but when you're dealing with plastic figures, I would recommend you get some plastic glue. Revel, Tamiya, Barilla Glue, lots of people make plastic cement. Plastic cement chemically reacts and actually melts the plastic into each other. Stay away from stuff like 10x and stuff like that as it's a little too strong for small plastic figs. It will really melt the figure. But something like this, the quick setting Tamiya, you'll notice there, even when I dropped it, boom, the thing is still together and just fine. I put the piece together, dropped the glue into the open space in between the two, let it sit there, dry and it was good. Let's talk about other types of glues. Once you go outside of plastic or when you're dealing with basing material, you're going to need super glue. I prefer something like a Zappa Gap. Always go for the medium CA glue when you're dealing with normal super glues. You can use these for resins, metal miniatures, basing material. However, if you need really heavy duty, I prefer something like the Loctite Ultra Gel over the medium CA. It holds stronger, it's a gel, it takes a few minutes to set, you can still move the piece around and it will last a heck of a long time. Now this is a small one, but a lot of easy to build miniatures, especially when you're starting out, have these little peg holes. You see how one side has a peg and the other side has a little hole you're supposed to slot it in. And if you're like me, it's actually really hard to get these things to go together perfectly. So here's a simple trick. Take your nippers or your clippers, or even your Xacto, and cut the peg down. So you saw how I sliced off about a third of the peg there? I just chopped a piece off. Then I retest. Does it slide all the way in? If it's still a little rough, then instead I take the nippers or the clippers and I cut a small triangle out of the hole that you're supposed to slide the peg into. Actually, even if you just put a few cuts into the circle, it can have a great effect. Now when I test, it slides right in all the way and goes flush without too much effort. One of the problems with this easy to build sort of peg and hole thing is that they can oftentimes have an outward pressure where it's pushing the miniature back. And so it's very hard to keep it completely flush and tight, a small snip to both sides, a little application of plastic glue, and you have a perfectly tight assembled miniature ready to go. All right, let's talk about gap filling. There are lots of options for gap filling on the market. No matter how good a miniature is, no matter how tight you put it together, there's always going to be some gaps. The most common thing we run into is liquid green stuff. It's garbage, throw it away. This is plastic putty from Vallejo and perfect plastic putty from Deluxe. Both of these are fine. They're both water soluble. You can put them into the space, layer them up, wet them down, and smooth them out. The problem with both of them is that they do shrink quite a bit. That's why if you're going to do a heavy gap fill, I prefer something like milliput. This is super fine white. I like the super fine white more than the traditional yellow and gray. But actually for most small gaps, I use sprugu. Vallejo linked up in the top all about sprugu, but it's effectively sprue melted in plastic. You can use any of these, but the sprugu is one of the easiest ones to work with, and you can also assemble your miniatures with it. Let's bring it all together. Here I have the final pieces of the miniature, and this is where we come to another tip. When you're just starting out, never glue first. Always dry fit. There's no glue on the sky. I'm just fitting everything together, making sure it's got a nice tight thing. I didn't miss any pieces. It's been sanded. It's been cut. It's been cleaned, and everything fits together. I remove about a third of the peg since it has this little peg joint connection. Now what I'm going to do is take it apart, and I'm actually going to apply some of my sprugu right there on the inside of the miniature. Because it's part plastic glue, part plastic sprue, it's going to actually create a bonding agent to hold everything together really strongly, which is so nice. It also, because it squidges out, gap fills, and once it's dry, you can sand it down the same as you would any other plastic using your files we talked about earlier. Once that's there, I push it all together and let it set. And you'll notice, though, there's a big old gap there. Now let's see that sprugu in action. So I just take some of my sprugu, put it over the edge. Now at the moment, there's a big ridge, but I put a big old dollop on there. Then I take my regular plastic glue, which is going to thin and melt the sprugu, and I just run it along the edge of where I put my sprugu, softening it and making so it's easy, and it settles. As that plastic cement, that plastic glue melts into the sprugu, it all sludges together and fills the gap perfectly. No bumps. Very rarely do you have to sand it later. It becomes the easiest method for filling those gaps instantaneously. And with that, he's all assembled and ready to go. Final notes, if you've got extra soft or rough spots where you cleaned up with your knife, you can also use the plastic glue. Just run it over there to clean that up. It'll smooth out all that little rough, dusty patch in any spots that are rough from your exacto knife. Nice little touch to get it perfectly smooth and finished at the end. So with that, I hope you liked this. If you did, give it a like. Subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future. If you've got questions, drop them down below. But as always, thank you for watching and we'll see you next time.