 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video today. We're gonna talk about something basic We're gonna talk about preparing and assembling resin resin kits. So let's get into it Let's strict techno man sir that is Vincy V. Let us get to the technique and learn it Vincy V Many of the kits we assemble in this hobby are plastic and plastic is nice. It's easy. It's clean It's usually fast. You can pull it out and shave it up And we've done previous videos on all the basics to assembly for that But if you're in this hobby for long enough or if you'd want to do display miniatures Or if you just want to expand your army into sometimes older or different minis Well, you're gonna run into the wonderful world of resin and when we're not talking about 3d printed resin But instead resin you're gonna buy as a model kit oftentimes. There are some extra steps We need to do to get that prepared and ready to paint so today I'm gonna take you through all the steps you want to do when preparing those resin model kits to get them ready to Actually be painted Let's head over to the desk. We'll take a look as soon as I received Horace ascended in the mail I was like this I've got to paint this this fig is awesome So let's crack him open and talk about our steps that we're gonna do and There's a really important step here that I feel people often overlook That is check the pieces now This is true whether you're buying a GW resin kit Which might be some of the most common folks out there in the world run into but it's also true if you're buying it from you know Display figures or competition figures or high-end stuff and that is just take all the pieces out and check them Resin miniatures are often much more bespoke. They're produced in smaller batches There's often a lot more human intervention and so, you know pieces can get missed and by the way most Manufacturers and casters are more than happy to replace a missing piece if it occurs So, but it's just worth a quick check Step two is of course you clean the pieces here We've got an old toothbrush obviously not one you're gonna put in your face ever again And we're just we made a little bath out of a little ziplock thing with some good old-fashioned dawn If it's good enough to clean oil off of Sea creatures and birds and stuff. It's good enough to get the Mold release off of your miniatures resin miniatures are much more susceptible to having mold release on them And so as a result you want to make sure that You're given each of them a good scrub. We'll talk later as you get through handling the piece Of ways you can also use it, but this is a good first step gets everything clean gets all that mold release off Once the pieces are clean then it's time to clip and file now I like to have two different sizes of clippers for resin miniatures. So first we start with a good tough pair of clippers a Lot of the channels these little things where the resin flows in this is all tubular things. They're totally tubular They're pretty thick on some resin minis and so as a result you you want to have something with some weight behind it You clip off the majority of it with there But don't try to over clip because you're gonna come back in with your razor blade and you're gonna scrape And I want to talk about razor blade safety here Notice how much I'm choking up on the razor. You see where my fingers are vis-a-vis the blade itself Like I am holding it very very high up and that is intentional That is because when you do that sort of thing it helps avoid you cutting yourself, which is important With smaller pieces like this we use I like to have a good pair of nippers now These are from Tamiya. You don't need to go out and buy like the God hand or anything like that But there are really fine clippers or nippers out there that are much better for these resin pieces that are this small very small resin pieces like this are Extremely fragile and so as a result you don't want to put anything with a lot of torque behind it That's gonna potentially snap the piece Once it's there again, we take the razor we take the piece We choke up a lot on both and we just clean those final little elements We don't rely just on the razor blade though It's important with this stuff to sand it down to get it smooth I keep a couple different grits of these little sanding sticks around you can just buy these in bulk off of ebay or Amazon or at your local craft store and I just start with the medium grit and then go down to the fine And then I'll usually like wet the area just to make sure it looks good and smooth and flat But if you're not sure Just keep applying some overall pressure with the very fine one You it's hard for you to remove too much if you feel like there's a big chunk It's not coming off you go back to the razor blade and then go back to the sanding again easy peasy Lemon squeezy you've got those pieces clean and ready to go Now once everything has been cut and Sanded then our next step is obviously gluing it but we do not just glue these pieces together First of all, we can't use plastic glue with these that should be obvious So we have to use some kind of more traditional glue, but step one before you ever bring glue into the case into the Equation is dry fitting always dry fit every piece This is probably good advice for plastic as well But it's especially important for resin because once that glue gets on there if you have to pop it back off It's gonna be really hard because you got to cut it all down Re-sand it back again to get it flush Resin minis are almost by their nature not as precise and clean with the way the the joints go together as plastic miniatures are and So as a result you you want to be first time correct when you glue So once we've got the dry fit we know we're good. We've got our angles. We put in our glue I like the lock tight gel glue you can buy these in big packs and nicely it reacts to Accelerant so you can use this accelerant like you can for most of these super glues So I put a good dollop of that in there put a little bit of the of the accelerant on and then two seconds later Bang bang jobs a gooden Then comes the fun part Just moving our way through all of the pieces all of the individual little elements You'll see me like cutting scraping sanding doing all these things as time goes on here I didn't record the entire process because I don't want to bore you to absolute tears But I work sort of component by component To make sure that each one has been cut scraped Sanded filed and then glued into its individual elements resin kits often do take more time and that's okay Now very high-end display resin miniatures might not have this much work associated with them Sometimes they do sometimes they don't it depends on the individual caster and where you're purchasing it from But that's just it when we're not talking about something that's from a major company You can oftentimes have a high variance in quality in this case what we're assembling is Horace the Ascended now I will say this is one of the crispiest resin kits. I've ever seen from GW. It is really high quality Very few shims everything pops off really nice This is an amazing kit But even here we have to take that extra time to clean stuff up because it's always a part of life when you're dealing with resin The gluing and scraping and such continues, but as we get on to these bigger components You're gonna find two things first. You're gonna find that not all these pieces fit together perfectly It's just the nature with resin that it can more easily warp even just slightly and then you don't get a completely flush fit We're also going to raise the question of Sub-assemblies and exactly what goes where what do we actually glue and what don't we glue? So let's talk sub-assemblies In general, I leave I try to assemble the model as much as humanly possible. I hate sub-assemblies and with resin minis Depending on what they are you can often do the whole mini especially if it's like a bust or something like that Most of them are are if you're talking about larger scale display minis You often don't have the need to leave things apart in this case because we're dealing with a traditional space marine I want to leave the head out of there and that's the only sub-assembly I'm gonna have and that's so I can actually paint the whole head the whole face because it sits into that big Sort of terminator style armor or whatever it is. He's wearing. I know his name has some his armor has some special name I don't know what it is But and I simply prepare a little paper clip with a tiny amount of glue on it and then pop that bad boy on there and Good to go now when We actually come to Putting the head in there I'm going to cut the paper clip flush and set the head in there as normal I'm not gonna try to use the paper clip to assemble that head into the model But for now, I'm just using it as a little painting stand and then I'll use my clippers and such later to actually then Clip that off scrape it down slide the head in place But everything else like the pelt and all those other things I went ahead and assembled because they were just too in each other's business There's too much overlap too much stuff like the maces on top of the cloak and so on With resin you are often going to be needing to gap fill Now I particularly like green stuff for gap filling, but you know you can use whatever you want when it comes to gap filling You could use milliput the same way but one of the reasons I like a green stuff in this particular case because I can really easily make snakes and snakes are the Basically the quintessential unit of gap filling you just take a little piece of green stuff You roll it between your fingers widening your fingers widening your fingers and then boom there you go You can make a little thin snake that you can then lay on the model Now when it comes to actually filling the gap what we're going to do here is just take a small piece Place it in there We want our tools to be just a little bit wet so that they don't stick to the tool and so the green stuff doesn't stick to the tool and We the first and most important part is just get the little snake in place Don't worry about what it looks like start by just getting it in place. So that's what you see me doing here Then I'm going to use my little dental tools here my little clay shaping dental tools to actually then Start to feather that out and make it look like fur and blend it into the actual surface There's lots of different tools you can use for this. This isn't a green stuff, you know tutorial video I do have another tutorial in this playlist about basic green stuff techniques including things like Making snakes and stuff like that So check that out if you want to see more detail, but here you can see I'm just working carefully My tool is just slightly moist. I keep a little wet sponge near me Just like open your wet palette and use the touch the the tool to your your sponge that's a good easy trick and I'm just using that to then keep it wet and then I work it into place and then work the fur out the Important part here is because it may take multiple applications of these little snakes To To actually get the gap filled and you don't want to be spending a lot of time trying to sculpt something only to then realize Once you have it sculpted that you still have gaps so like here you see I just didn't have enough in my first snake, so I bring up snake number two and Then boom have enough coverage that I can then work that out pull it out and shape it into actual fur Fur is nice. It's an easy thing to blend into because it's just it's just little You know, you just basically push into it and you can make a little swoopy-to-be Triangular patterns and bada-bing bada-boom you've got fur You like I said, you can use milliput. You can use other things, but green stuff's my choice I just find it easy once that's all filled We then do our detail review and what this means is you go over the miniature under an Extremely bright light like I have this white piece of paper towel under me I have a very bright light on because I want to be able to really see in full relief Anything that's left that still needs to be cleaned cut scraped sanded and so on And having things like the white shine through those holes in the cape lets me then spot them really easily But you're going to find stuff on the final pass kind of no matter how careful you are Or at least at least how to have no matter how careful I am. I always find stuff As I've handled this whole bunch and done things I often go in and over the major surfaces I take a little 99% isopropyl alcohol with a little makeup sponge like you see here and just give a quick clean This gets a lot of the you know oils and other stuff like that. I've been handling this off I'm not looking to do a full clean here, but I'm especially looking on those big flat smooth surfaces To get everything finally clean Lastly when you're priming priming will always reveal a few things like I noticed this little tube It didn't quite attach so for this for tiny little details like this You can still use good old-fashioned sprue goo now You can't assemble your resin minis with it But for tiny little fixes like that little gap a little sprue goo is perfect That'll harden in just a matter of minutes and that boy is ready to go There we go. Horace is all assembled ready to go We kept the sub-assemblies pretty minor on him because the nature of the figure But he looks like a lot of fun to paint. I'll be honest. I'm pretty excited about painting this dude I think he's super cool Like what an awesome upgrade to this figure. I I got this and I was just immediately Excited to start putting it together and painting it. So what a great chance to do this video If you want to see me paint it Hey, why don't you drop that down in the comments below and we'll see what we can do but as always I thank you so much for watching this one Go ahead and hit like if you haven't already subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future We have new videos here every Saturday. If you want to support the channel There's a patreon down below focused on review and feedback and taking your next step on your hobby journey As always though, I thank you so much for watching this one and we'll see you next time You