After being prodded by a friend to
make it so that the doors of some of his vehicles would have working
hinges where they hadn't before, I gave it a try.
One success led to being asked to do it
again on another vehicle.
Very quickly I realized that my time
was far too valuable to waste on making them from scratch for each
vehicle, so I made these hinge pins as a short-cut. (They are
available
here.)
The photos below will show a step by
step guide to how I used them on one of Games Workshop's Space Marine
Rhinos.
The tools I
used are shown above.
They are a pin vise (Two, in this case) with drills sized .022 in.
and .035 in., wire clippers, hobby knife, and a sharp center punch (This one I made
from a steel wire with a pyramid shaped tip ground onto it.)
The pin with the larger head was right
for this job and the first thing I did was drill it through with a
.035 bit. I left it on the sprue for easier handling.
I drilled in about halfway from one
side then finished drilling from the other side. This kept burrs from
forming when the drill exited the hole.
Using the point of a hobby knife,
I removed part of the integral hinge on the upper hatch door. I made
light cuts at different angles to cut out small wedges of material to
avoid breaking the hinge.
In this case, I had to cut into the
edge of the door at an angle so that enough material would be removed to accommodate the
cylinder of the pin. The cylinder of the pin needed to be flush with
the cylinder of the hinge on the door or it would not work properly.
Once enough material was removed from
the door, I placed the door in its proper position on the model and
used my center-punch tool to mark where I had to drill.
This will need to be done before you
permanently insert the pins into the door hinge.
A thumbtack or something similar would
have worked just as well as a center-punch.
I then drilled out the hinge on the
door with a .022 bit. I went all the way through the outer part but
did not drill all the way through the inner part. The slightly over-sized holes will allow the hinges to move without stressing the plastic too much.
I used .020 brass rod for the
connecting pin that holds the two parts of the hinge together.
After clipping the wire to size, I
applied a small droplet of CA glue to the outside of the hinge where
the brass connector pin was inserted. I wiggled the hinge pin to
ensure that it did not get glued in place.
Then the burr of the brass rod was
filed down flush with the outer part of the hinge.
The body was drilled in the spots
marked by the center-punch with a .035 drill and the narrow ends of
the hinge pins were inserted in the resultant holes and glued from
below. This would have been easier if the model had not been
pre-assembled (I received it that way).
Before inserting them, the hinge pins needed to be
trimmed by about one millimeter or they would protrude into the
interior of the vehicle.
It's a good idea to make sure both
doors fit well before gluing them in place.
The same techniques were used to attach the side doors to the vehicle but it required the use of the smaller hinge pins.
