Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Hey,

So I want to magnetize my Necron Praetorians and Lychguard.

They come in the same kit, and you can assemble 5 of either. I have 4 kits, and I want to have 10 of each. The thing is, both Praetorians and Lychguard can have two weapon options, and these options use some of the same parts. This makes it a bit tricky to make all options work.

I really cannot explain the problem without going into detail.

Both Lychguard and Praetorians have a two-handed weapon option and a separate hands option (pistol and weapon for Praetorians, sword & board for Lychguard). In a kit you get 10 right hands (5 of those are to be used only for the sword arm for Lychguard) and 5 left hands that are to be used by everyone. The arms are strictly arms, fists are molded with the weapons. Each two-handed weapon requires a particular pair of arms to be used. The Lychguard and Praetorian two handed weapons use the same two handed shaft, only the attachment on the end is different.

As for the other parts of the kit, Lychguard and Praetorian models share the legs, front half of the chest/shoulderpads, and the neck. Everything else is different between the two.

I also have a bunch of left hands from other kits that I can use. All Necrons seem to be using the same arms except for the elbow angle.

To sum it up, here are the bits I have:

20 legs, front chests and necks
20 Praetorian heads and back assemblies and leg attachments, same for Lychuard
20 left arms, 40 right arms, and I could make more left arms
20 of each one handed weapon/shield
20 two-handed weapon shafts
20 of either two-handed weapon attachment.

With these parts I could assemble 10 Lychguard, 10 Praetorians, and both weapon options for each of them with arms attached to the weapons. The problem with this approach is with the two handed options. On Necron models, arms are attached to the chest via deep holes on the sides of the chest and I couldn't spread the arms to make this work. You can maybe see what I'm talking about on this picture here:



I considered cutting the shoulders so that the two weapon option, with magnets included, would slide flush onto the chest, but that seems really fiddly. I don't think I could make it flush.

Another option would be to glue each arms and weapons pair to a back assembly and magnetize the back assembly to the front half of the chest (that is glued to the legs, neck and head). I do have the bits to do it. The problem with this approach is that you'd be able to see lines where the two halves meet on the shoulder pad. This would look especially bad on the Lychguard whose shoulder pads are supposed to be flat and plain. Example

Or I could fix the left (or right) arm to the body and magnetize at the wrist of that arm and the shoulder of the other arm. That way everything would be ok, except that I'd be forced to match each model to it's own two handed weapon. That seems like a mess to manage, and would make the contact fairly weak. I'd like to be able to pick the model up by the weapon.

I'm really at a loss here. Any ideas?

Load the torso with greenstuff, cut the deep shoulder socket parts off, stronk magnets?

kb_lock wrote:
Load the torso with greenstuff, cut the deep shoulder socket parts off, stronk magnets?

My only problem with that approach is that it would be extremely difficult to get the distance between magnets in the torso exactly right on all of them, and the same for the magnets on shoulders of arms holding two-handed weapons. I think that even the slightest mismatch would leave the arms either not fitting or rotating under weight. But out of these options that might be the easiest to pull off.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Here's a variant of that I like more: magnetize the shoulders at an angle? This would allow for some flexibility regarding distances between magnets, and also keep the arms from rotating.

That would indeed solve your rotation issues.

I don't know why you'd have a lot of problems spacing your magnets out - you could effectively have the arm ones hanging right out of the model so they are effectively pegs going into the shoulder sockets. I have some 3mm x 2mm long cylinders that would probably be good for that. Couple that with a 2mm x 2mm or 2mm x 3mm in the socket itself and you should be able to get a strong enough bond.

kb_lock wrote:
That would indeed solve your rotation issues.

I don't know why you'd have a lot of problems spacing your magnets out - you could effectively have the arm ones hanging right out of the model so they are effectively pegs going into the shoulder sockets. I have some 3mm x 2mm long cylinders that would probably be good for that. Couple that with a 2mm x 2mm or 2mm x 3mm in the socket itself and you should be able to get a strong enough bond.

I'm not sure I understand what you're suggesting, sorry :(

Don't sink the magnets all the way into the arm so they are flush, let them hang out a bit

Ignore the fact that this looks like a picture of dicks, it is arms. The one on the left is fully flush sunk, the one on the right is hanging out half way - this should add more stability (potentially)


Automatically Appended Next Post:
god that image is bad

I'm not sure we're on the same page. Here's a better look at the bits in question:





Notice how arms have these 'balls' after the shoulder that are supposed to fit inside the chest. What I'd need to do is cut these balls off (they'd get in the way of putting arms on the torso when the arms are in one piece with the two handed weapon), fill in the sockets in the chest with green stuff, and put magnets. These magnets would go where I made the cut on the shoulder and in the green stuff, so it's entirely up to me to make sure the distance between the left and right pair of magnets is perfectly the same on all torsos and two handed arm pairs. I don't think I can do this, not without dedicated spacers or maybe some rig.

If I tilt magnets the problem is reduced as, for example if I make a chest with magnets that are a bit too narrow, the arms would simply go higher on that model and fit right in. It still wouldn't be easy but it gives me a margin of error.

It would be much, much easier to glue all arm pairs to a back and magnetize the back. That way I could even go wild with postures and whatnot, but, you'd be able to see where the two halves meet considering that I paint the shoulder pads in a fairly light color.

Yeah, I was imagining a larger torso cap.

I really don't think you can glue them to the backs and then magnetise the fronts - it would look pretty bad imho.

You could use the actual shoulder sockets as your guide/jig though - just literally fill them completely with greenstuff so they are flush, then drill them for magnets. Alternatively, there is a midpoint line on them you could fill to, which would keep them consistent.

The tilt, while a good idea and will help with sag, will also add another element to the equation that requires more accuracy.

Realistically, if it were me, I would probably not bother with this level. I magnetised a full squad of SM tacticals so I could take them apart and repaint, and holy hell that was a waste of time. They look great, and do exactly what I had hoped, but I haven't gained anything from it.

Definitely a noodle scratcher of a problem - how many can you sacrifice to test?

Ideally, none. I'd have to buy another box to experiment. That said, there are amazing bits for conversions in the kit, but I'm over my budget already.

And I think it's reasonable to have magnetizable weapon loadouts. Especially for the Lychguard where the load completely changes the purpose of the unit. It's difficult, but would be a useful magnetization.

Maybe I could put magnets normally on one side, and above or behind the shoulder on the other side? There's very little room for that, 2x1mm magnets at most, but it's a possibility. I think that'd look very ugly though, with the shoulder just floating mid air seemingly.

Any other ideas? I'm still trying to solve this. I have a pile of sprues waiting to become models, and this is killing me

I think I dropped the idea of assembling model backs to different arms and magnetizing the backs to the chest fronts. It'd look terrible because of the shoulderpads.

As for magnetizing arms in the shoulders or something along those lines, I'd have to use tiny magnets on the arms (2x1mm or something) and the contact would be extremely weak.

Now I'm thinking about finding alternative bits that would make this magnetization possible. Not sure what I'm looking for, but there must be something.

What I did was I bought a box of warriors and used their legs/chest/heads/arms with a box of lychguard/preatoriens and make one 5man unit of sword&board lychguard one unit of ROC preatoriens and one unit of void blade/particle caster preatoriens

I made the lychguard normally. Took the front chest and legs of warriors and with a dremel tool smothed out in inside of the front chest and stuck it on the back part of the preatorien (also of note I left the back ribcage part off the back parts to use for a 2nd set of preatoriens) I took the head part of the rod of convant and placed it on the front of the gauss rifles of the warriors to give it a more shooty look but still keeping the melee look to it as well. I'll post as soon as I can the step by step and final product. They look more like warriors with jetpacks but still unique in of themselves.

For the 3rd part one can go with either more lychguard or more preatoriens(i went with this since i got 5 extra lychguard from a friend in a trade). with the 'tail' part for the preatoriens and the ribcage pack piece along with the particle caster and void blade i put them on warrior body/legs.

This gives me warscythes for another group of lychguard in the future (or if done the other way particle casters and void blades for future preatoriens)

The squat potion of the warriors makes them look like they are landing or about to jump forward again instead of these menacing walking forward the normal legs give.







Since you seem to want to magnetize them I would say get the arms where you want them on each model and then just magnetize the weapons to fit on the wrist. You would again need to use tiny magnets but the connection being weak isn't as bad as one might think. Just use 1/16" x 1/32" (2mm x 1mm) Neodymium Rare Earth Tiny Disc Magnets and you should be set.

Oberron wrote:
What I did was I bought a box of warriors and used their legs/chest/heads/arms with a box of lychguard/preatoriens and make one 5man unit of sword&board lychguard one unit of ROC preatoriens and one unit of void blade/particle caster preatoriens

Interesting. I have a bunch of Warriors still on sprues, enough to assemble everything. The legs are slimmer, the chests seem smaller, they lack the shoulderpads, and I'd need to make necks out of greenstuff which is not really a problem. I could use this lighter set of chests/legs on Preatorians and heavier on Lychguard or something like that.

Do you have any pics? Could you take any? I'd appreciate it a lot. Thanks.

EDIT:

I saw your edit too late Thank you so much,

While i magnitize tons of stuf fin my army, I can say doing the shoulders on necron arms, is a pain.
(my lords are all magnitized at the shoulder).

If you have 20 models, I would make 10 lychguard, and 10 praetorians.

In all sincerity, what is your time worth?

Pratorians are going to be with the staff.
for lychguard, you prolly want shield versions.

If you do want lychguard wtih war scythes (why? just use praetorians? ) just get another box??

anyway, best of luck - but this sounds like a lot of work to save maybe $30?

That's what I was considering last night. I'm unlikely to be using Praetorians without their staff thing. I'd like both versions of the Lychguard, but all I'd need to buy is 10 more dudes that I could find for ~$55 on e-bay. That would also let me pose them creatively.