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Okies, planning on starting a new and fairly large marine army within the months, and I'm looking for whatever wisdom Dakka has about various parts of it. What I'm mostly interested in is the bits of knowledge you learned in the process of putting an army together, but wish you figured out before you started out...

Anyway, some questions...

- Back when I started out making a Chaos army, I always hated getting the plastic pads from the sprues. They always seemed to have the most annoying bits of the sprue left over, and were more of a pain to get trimmed down than other pieces. Anyone have any tricks here, or just some "oh, duh" moments about their shoulder pads? Getting the extra bit off of plastic bases usually irritates me for much the same reason.

- Ok, I'll admit it. I'm terrible with super glue. My pinned metal stuff stays together well enough, but any time I end up putting metal to plastic, it ends up being irritably unreliable when it comes to, well, sticking together. Case and point -- I built a Space Wolves army I was pretty proud of, and used metal shoulder pads on all of the power armored folks. Of course, I painted the pads separately from the rest of the models before gluing them on, but still, everything else worked out, but the pads kept falling off. Any obvious things I might be doing wrong?

- And, then, the bolter. On my Wolves, I did pads and bolters separately. The bolters, while they stayed on better, always seemed messy when it came to attaching them to the marine after getting both parts painted. Is there a trick here I'm missing? I did about half of them with plastic cement (trying to scrape off a bit of paint at the join to make it stick), but switched to super glue for less mess, even if the bond was stronger. Neither setup really made me terribly happy.

- Weighting the bases. I found some washers that fit the bases almost perfectly, super-glued them in place. That worked for a few months, then they started falling off en masse. Is there some better way to do it, or just to make sure they get to set for a good long time (since with the Wolves I did this after assembling the models and not before gluing legs to bases as I should have, they didn't really have an optimal position to set)? I'd like to stick with the washers (or some similar solution as opposed to fishing weights -- the washers were ferrous, which has plenty of advantages).

- Base marine armor recipe. For my Wolves, I ended up doing:
1) Very light coat of GW white spray primer
2) 3 base coats of Reaper Master Series version of Shadow Grey, watered down to 50%
3) Light edging of RMS versions of Shadow Grey/Space Wolf Grey 1:1 mixture, watered down to 50%
4) Thin, light, edging of RMS version of Space Wolf Grey, watered down to 50%
5) Very, very light drybrushing of RMS version of Space Wolf Grey
I thought they ended up pretty good. I only used washes on the flesh, but I suspect I'll add a wash of one of the new GW washes (due to the glowing reviews I've seen) after the base coat (and, of course, adjust colors to the new marines)
Any suggestions, tips, tricks? Looking mostly for what folks learned in the process of painting an army but wished they knew all along

- I'm really tempted to pick up an airbrush for the primer and base coat this time around.

- Probably doing Salamanders. In part as with the rumors, it's probably the chapter I'd end up playing as mostly, in part as next to the Ultramarines in the new book, the Salamanders just "popped" more than the other marines (and there are a lot of Ultras players around here...), and I'd like to do a chapter that has some GW/Forge World support. Of course, with what's known about the new codex, I'm not sure I'd even play the Salamanders character under 2k, but still...

- Anyone have any commentary about picking the color of the base of the model? Not of the top of it with the gravely bits and such, but the rim around the bottom. Never could come to a good conclusion with my Wolves and ended up leaving them white to go with the snow-style basing job...

Anyway, thanks for any responses. I know there are tons of tutorials out there, but I suppose I'm as much looking for random hints learned from folks who might not otherwise post tutorials. Of course, links to tutorials folks have followed to good success are quite appreciated.

Thanks again in advance.

Top tips as follows:

-When glueing metal to plastic (when it's not possible to pin, ie. shoulderpads) scratch both pieces with a sharp knife to rough the joining surfaces. This will give the glue more suface area to stick to.

-Don't drybrush after edging! It'll just give that 'fuzzy' look to the nice crisp highlights you've just applied. If you must drybrush, add a glaze over the top. In fact, glaze pretty much everything!

-For the edge of bases, the darker the better. You don't want to draw the eye away from the model to the rim of the base. I go for black pretty much always as it frames the mini nicely. Scorched brown is great too.

-Do you use clippers for the shoulder pads? If not, do! If you are and you still have trouble, try clipping the sprue off in sections with the pads attached so you can get the clipers in easier.

-A great recipie for flesh is bestial brown->dwarf flesh->elf flesh. It gives a nice healthy glow to the skin, which will work well for salamanders.

-I always glue washers/coins under bases with no problems. If you're using washers, try filling the hole with a thin layer of green stuff and spreading it over the washer to hold it in. Also, another method is to keep all the bits of metal flash you get and push them into green stuff under the base.

-Glazes are awesome. I can't stress this enough. They're 1 part ink/wash (I like inks for this) to 10-12 parts water, they should barely be visible. They really pull colours together, it's like adding a soft focus, so blending looks ace with glazes on top. Brown glazes over reds look great.

That's all I've got at the moment, hope that helps.

Cleaning up pads: one of the best tools you can get for this task is a sprue cutter. Either the GW or the Testors' brands make great ones. Any little bits can be easily trimmed with a razor knife of some kind.

Superglue: I can't stress this enough: less is more. You don't need large amounts of SG to get a bond, but SG eventually becomes brittle. High heat can cause this brittleness to accelerate over long periods.

Clip the pads, then file the little bits down.

Pin anything metal, even into plastic.

*Always* glue pads and bolters *before* priming and painting. If you can't paint it, we can't see it.

US Pennies are the cheapest source of base weights you can get. I recommend that you score the base and the penny before gluing with PVA. Epoxy would be even better, I think. But not nearly as cheap.

The new GW washes look awesome.

Montana Can makes spray acrylics. If you don't own an Airbrush, that's a lot of cans of spray paint...

Salamanders are fine, and freehand flames look great.

I like bases edged in black.

I find that the pads don't fit well... even plastic to plastic. I throw a tiny blob of greenstuff in there to create a better bond.

Okies, thanks for the responses. The more the merrier, of course...

Anyway:

I've generally used a clipper, but with a different mechanism than the Testor's/GW clipper, apparently. I'll pick one up and give it a shot.

Any suggestion for epoxy? I'm planning on using washers again and wouldn't mind spending a bit of extra cash and effort to get them to stick (permanently, at least) this time.

So, I'll share a trick with the washers that I wish I realized before starting -- if you put a washer in each base, and then take a few dowels and glue one of those nice little rare earth magnets to it, you have an instant reusable handle for painting your models. Additionally, you can jury rig a dish drying rack to hold a forest of these model handles during the process.

Going to try a few more test models with some washes this time around. Thanks again for the advice.

Anyone have any thoughts/comments on using a metal/plastic epoxy for metal shoulder pads on plastic marines instead of superglue?

Wasn't planning on doing it this time around, but I noticed the Alpha Legion metal shoulder pads have a nice appropriate dragon (I could have sworn in the past it was the three-headed hydra design, and the current one is new...), so I'm planning on using a stack of those.

*Always* glue pads and bolters *before* priming and painting. If you can't paint it, we can't see it.

Meh, there are exceptions to this, particularly with shoulderpads because they're so easy to plonk on at the end...

A lot of times the Bolters and shoulderpads will contrast with the rest of the model. In many cases, this can even mean a different primer color for each. For example, with Space Wolves, you might want to prime the model white, the Bolter black, and the shoulderpads spray yellow.

For shoulderpads, particularly ones with tricky colors like yellow, being able to spray on a nice coat is worth the hassle of gluing them later. The same could be said of Bolters... I'd rather glue them on later than have to go through the whole army hand painting them black while they're already on a model.

Anyone have any thoughts/comments on using a metal/plastic epoxy for metal shoulder pads on plastic marines instead of superglue?

I'd think it's a bad plan. Epoxy is basically giving you the same type of bond as super glue, but considerably slower.

I'm not really sure why you're having trouble with the shoulder pads. Maybe the ones you're getting just aren't fitted right. I did a lot of metal pads for my Blood Angels, and they went on fine. Normally it's best to be pretty sparing with super glue, but I found that with the shoulderpads you could go a bit more overboard.

Also, test fitting is always important, but you can also put on some glue, test that, and see how much has transferred to the glue-less side. If there's little or none, you know you put glue on parts that aren't touching, and you should spread it oot a bit more.

The trick with glue is always "how much."