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Struggling a bit with researching a feasible way to create my own "etched" symbols for use on my Ultramarines. Specifically, i want to have roman numeral 2 on my shoulder pads and i want them to stand out. Painting them looks a bit sloppy and I would like to add the depth effect. I found that there are suppliers who make etched brass cut outs, but the cutouts come with quite a bit of extra bits. Examples hasslefree miniatures and secret weapon.

Is there a way i can make these myself with a limited amount of hassle? I am considering asking a friend, who studies architecture, to see if he can use the machines at his university to cut them. Roman numeral 2 is easy enough i think!

I would think this will be much easier using thin plasti-card rather than brass and will give the same effect at a much reduced cost.

Yeah, me too. Cut your numeral from plasticard, use that to make a greenstuff-mould and then happy reproducing any pauldrons or vehicle symbols at will.

Brass etching isn't difficult - plenty of tutorials, kits and what not needed to get going.

Not sure if I would go Etched brass on this though. The compound curve of a space marine shoulder pad makes it a bit of a pain to apply once done (you can curve it using a peen and die pretty easily though...).

For shoulder pads - you can cut them from plasticard by hand pretty easily. If you hit up the crafty stores, you can find an assortment of paper punches too - which can go through plasticard fine as well (clean and consistent - and very fast...). Finding the ones small enough for shoulder pads can take a bit of work though.

Once you have that - you can either apply the punched plastic directly to the pads (bit of persuasion to lay them down on the curves) or create a mold.

I will look into making a green stuff mold then. Thanks!

EDIT:
Looked into mold making and it looks like a lot of effort if i want to have 30+ numerals sized for shoulder pads.

EDIT v2:
Any chance someone can do me a favor and create a bunch of roman numerals, as a .stl file, which i can print efficiently on a 3D printer? There are loads of them where i live where you can print for a price - link.

As cool as 3D printing is, I dont think its going to work so well for this kind of application...the plastic is (as far as I can tell) fairly stiff and will if anything be even harder to apply to a shoulder pad than brass!

Again i'd recommend plasticard for this...it's easily cuttable with a sharp knife, will be much easier to apply to a shoulder pad as its very flexible, and as its plastic, is easy to glue in place.

 HaRpEr wrote:
As cool as 3D printing is, I dont think its going to work so well for this kind of application...the plastic is (as far as I can tell) fairly stiff and will if anything be even harder to apply to a shoulder pad than brass!

Again i'd recommend plasticard for this...it's easily cuttable with a sharp knife, will be much easier to apply to a shoulder pad as its very flexible, and as its plastic, is easy to glue in place.

how would you recommend i cut the roman numeral 2? The center seems very tricky to cut