Armada : First X-Wing painted and laser canons pin tutorial

Hello everyone,

I just got my copy of Armada last week and I could not wait to see what I could do with the fighters.

At around 14 mm long the X-Wings are about 1/3rd the size of X-Wing miniatures X-Wings and of course much less detailed. However with a bit of detailing and freehand you can get a pretty convincing result.





To start I did not like the stubby canons on the stock models so I decided to replace them with pins.

Image taken from Lurtz tutorial on ffg forums

First I cut the barrels of the canons at the base, cleaning the model to get a nice flat surface. My pins are 0.6mm in diameter so I needed to carefully drill a hole in each gun mount to get a solid fit.

I tried with several small hobby drills (from 0.5mm  to 0.7mm) but could not get good results (the head did not bite) until I switched to my best small drill which is 0.8mm in diameter. This is the largest you will be able to use on the gun mounts.

I drilled in 2 passes, first a small guide hole:

then I came back and drilled about 2 mm.

Finally  I cut the pins to size. You want the guns to extend about 5 mm, so you need about 7 mm of pin.

Now repeat for 12 X-Wings :)

Of course for my first model had to be Red 5, Luke Skywalker fighter in A New Hope as I already painted it for X-Wing. Sorry for pictures, but it's really hard to photograph such small models!

While painting I needed something to hold the models so I took several plastic q-tips, cut one end and widened the hole to the diameter of the stand plug on the models:

Hope you enjoyed this article, stay tuned for more Star Wars goodness soon (who said anything about a Star Destroyer ?) .

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