Kai's Garage Kits

(if the drill’s spinning then i’m pinning!)

So you’ve prepped a garage kit and now you’re ready to assemble it. One by one, you painstakingly glue those dozens of tiny parts together, taking a minute to carefully align each one. Just as you’re putting on the final touches, though, disaster strikes! You accidentally knock your hand into the figure! It falls down! It was just a few inches to the table, and yet this short drop was enough to break your kit into pieces and undo all of your hard work. And that, dear kit-maker, is why we use pins.

Indeed, superglue alone is generally not a robust way to assemble a resin kit. And you can’t just use model kit cement to weld everything together. Pins, little metal rods running between each part, provide extra structure and are the best way to ensure that your kit will stay intact and continue to look good for years to come. So let’s talk about pinning!

First, tools and materials. Here’s a list of what you’ll need:

• Brass or aluminum rods
  • My recommended sizes: 0.5mm, 1mm, 2mm
• Nippers/cutting pliers
  • Don’t use nippers designed for plastic!
• Drill or Dremel tool
• Drill bits with the same diameter as your rods or slightly larger
• CA glue (superglue)
• (Optional) Liquid masking fluid
• (Optional) Pin vise
• (Optional) Putty

While you can use paper clips or solid wire in lieu of straight rods, I’d strongly advise seeking out the latter in a soft-ish metal (I usually use brass) if you can. You can easily find them online or at hobby stores, and if you buy them straight to begin with it will save you the hassle of un-bending and removing the kinks from your pins every time. Softer metals, as opposed to something like steel, are easier to cut to size and work with, and they’ll still function perfectly well as supports. That said, I assembled my first GK with paperclips!

The pin sizes I usually use are 0.5mm, 1mm, and 2mm. Of these, 1mm is my workhorse and the size I use for most things, as it’s sufficient to secure most joints. The only time I switch to larger-diameter pins is to attach particularly bulky pieces together or where a lot of weight needs to be supported. You can also use multiple pins in lieu of one large one.

I use a Dremel to drill all of my holes, but for particularly small parts you may want to use a pin vise instead. With power tools, it’s easy to drill clear through small parts if you’re not careful. I recommend using a rotary tool for most jobs, though; doing the whole thing with a pin vise would take a LONG time! A good rule of thumb is to consider switching to a pin vise for parts small enough to require 0.5mm pins and sticking with the Dremel for 1mm and above.

One final note about tools before we jump into the process. This is a matter of personal preference, but I usually use drill bits that are very slightly larger than the diameter of my pins (and I do mean VERY slightly). I like to have a little extra play in my joints to account for minor misalignments, and when it comes time for final assembly I use superglue to fill the gaps and secure the pins. Some people prefer to drill holes that are slightly smaller than the diameter of the pins, which allows you to friction-fit the pins without having to glue them in. Like I said, it’s just personal preference; experiment a little and see what technique works best for you!

Alright, on to the actual work of pinning! At its core, it’s pretty simple: wherever two parts meet, drill a hole on either side, cut a length of rod to size, insert it into one of the holes, and put ’em together! Far and away the trickiest part of the process is getting the alignment right when you’re drilling. I’ll describe a few different techniques for doing so.

You can, of course, just eyeball it. This is not accurate at all! But you can do it. For example, sometimes the alignment between two parts doesn’t really matter that much, and you can get away with imperfect positioning. But always do a test assembly before assuming something like that! If the parts have alignment pegs or are keyed in some way, you can sometimes just drill through the middle of said pegs and achieve a decently reliable fit. Sometimes you’ll even find the remnants of old pin holes in the sculpt, left over from when the original sculptor was test-assembling their figure before committing it to a mold. You can often just re-drill these out and use them, but a word of caution: just because they were perfectly aligned in the prototype does NOT mean that they’ll match up in the production kit! Silicone molds can shift and warp and suffer from misalignments, and there’s no guarantee that what went into the mold when making it is exactly the same shape as what comes out of the mold afterwards.

For most of my pins, I use the liquid mask technique. You stick a small dot of liquid masking medium on one side of a joint and press the two sides together, leaving two perfectly aligned dots indicating where you need to drill. I use Micro Mask, but you can use whatever you find at your local hobby store. It’s important to be precise here! To that end, I usually apply the liquid mask with a toothpick, dipping its point into the bottle and then placing a drop where I want my pin to be. Afterwards, you can drill straight through the mask and (hopefully) have perfectly aligned holes! The mask will generally come off when you drill through it, but if there is any left over afterwards, make sure you remove it so it doesn’t interfere with anything down the line.

Another technique is to drill in from the outside. Hold or temporarily glue the parts together and then drill all the way through one and into the other. This, of course, will necessitate some patching afterwards, but it is the most accurate way of achieving perfect alignment.

The entry hole can be patched up with putty. Apply it to the hole, let it cure, and then sand it flat. I find that it’s easiest to make the patch job invisible if you pick a relatively flat surface to drill into. This makes it trivial to sand the whole thing level. Avoid drilling into areas of detail, as they’ll make the patch harder to hide and give you a lot more trouble!

For places where some extra support may be needed, particularly in a figure’s feet, it may be sturdier to join a series of parts together with a single pin rather than pinning each one separately. To that end, I often run one long, solid pin through a figure’s base, shoes, and legs. You can align all three (or more) holes by placing the shoe on the base and drilling down through the assembly, then taking the shoe off the base, attaching it to the leg, and drilling up through the hole you just made. This gives you an easy way to align a single hole through more than two parts.

For small parts that are thin at the joint, it may be hard to drill deep enough to secure the pin safely. A technique you can use to mitigate this is to drill in at a steep angle that gives you more depth to work with, insert the pin, and then bend the protruding end so it sticks out in the correct direction.

If you’re concerned about accidentally drilling too deep and coming out the other side of your part, you can make a mark on your drill bit to indicate where you should stop. Hold the drill bit up next to the part so you can figure out the correct depth, then use a Sharpie to draw a line around the bit at that point. When you’re making your hole, stop once you hit that mark. The ink will come off next time you drill beyond that depth.

It’s a good idea to do periodic test assemblies of your kit. This will allow you to check for alignment and fitment issues. If you find that you do have some, no worries! Just bend the pin into shape or re-drill the hole if you have to. If worst comes to worst, you can fill the existing holes with epoxy putty and redo them from scratch.

Before I move on to the next steps of kit-building, I like to glue each pin into one of the parts it joins. In doing so, I try to ensure that every part has at least one pin sticking out. This means that they’ll each have something to hold on to when you’re painting them. Very helpful!

And that’s it! Your kit is now pinned! You’ve reached an exciting stage of the process, as you can finally do a full test assembly of the kit (but don’t glue it together yet! An unassembled kit is much easier to paint). Sometimes I just let my GKs sit in this state for a while; even without paint, they’re fun to look at! Take some time to examine the naked sculpt and appreciate the work the sculptor put into it. When you’re ready to move on, it’ll be time to clean the resin and prime it.