How to Guide:
Collecting miniatures - Building Your Minis

In the last article I spoke about what you'd need to get started in the miniatures hobby. This time I'm going to be talking about constructing the miniatures you bought in step 2. Constructing your models is the bread and butter of collecting miniatures as a hobby.

Part 3 - Construction

95% of miniatures games out there will not be selling their miniatures to you ready-built. This might seem like they're lazy and expecting you to do half the work, but they'd hardly be your miniatures if they did all the work. One of the most fulfilling things in the miniatures hobby is fielding a force of models that you personally built, painted and customised in your own personal way. A unique army at your fingertips awaits you, but you've got to put some effort in first.

Hopefully you've brought yourself a good pair of plastic clippers. They're at their most important at this stage. Once you've acquired your models to assemble, you're going to need to 'clean' them first. If they're on a sprue, they need clipping off and then de-flashing. If they're metal models, they need de-flashing.

De-flashing can be an arduous process. In short, it means removing any excess plastic or metal from a model that was left there from when the model was in the mold. Metal models can also often be covered in a thin white residue from their time in the mold. Both of these things are very common and the latter can be ignored most of the time.

At this stage, if you feel comfortable enough with doing it you should also go over the mold lines of a model and file those away. These are natural occurrences from the mold (bloody thing can be more trouble than it's worth sometimes). They occur where the model has been pressed together and are removed by filing them until they can't be seen or until the area looks acceptable. It's fine to ignore them if you're not comfortable with trying to remove them. On 'professional' miniatures though it's considered a sign of laziness to have not attempted to remove them, but if you're just starting out then it's understandable to ignore them from time to time.