Guardian Construction: WIP 4x Squads (40 troops) & Weapon platform with magnets

Short post with some progress - I haven't taken a lot of detailed pics of assembly; I've been working on these quickly rather than carefully as I want to get through all 40 without too much effort...

I have a couple of small tackle boxes being used to store parts - these quickly filled up with the raw pieces; guardian sprues come with separates pieces or sets for (a) legs (b) torso (c) arms+weapon (d) head/helmet (e) fins/vanes on the back. 

For each 10 man squad, there are 2 copies of 4 variations of each part on the main sprues... with small details like the runes/gemstones being handy to tell them apart. 

There are also 2 additional models (single piece body + torso castings) in a squad for the gunner/spotter models to give you a set of 10 troops in total. 

With all the individual pieces cleaned up and mold lines removed (as I found out later, I probably missed a couple of these, but eh... it's the basic set of bulk troops); I laid out sets of 4x pieces and then mixed different arm/leg combinations to get as much variety as possible from the limited sprue options. 

Once generally happy with the mix, these have been plastic glued together - posing the arms or torso with some different angles for those that end up being duplicates anyway. 

Repeat the whole process for the 2nd batch of 20... 

And then finally turn to the weapons platforms... I was a bit keen to work on these as both a chance to do some engineering with magnets, and the fact that I only ever had one metal weapon platform in the 1990s (which was a pig to work on; and chipped paint off when it brushed past a feather). 

Possibly a little hard to see in the pic below - the 'millennium falcon' base has a 3mm magnet in the centre, and a matching magnet in the little turret so that the weapon can swivel. The top of the turret has two 2x2mm cylinder magnets in the slot at the top. 

The matching tab on the underside of each heavy weapon has be filed off, and two more 2x2mm magnets drilled & installed there. In practice - the tab probably would have been enough to hold with friction rather than magnets... but my approach feels quite secure. 

Repeat this process for the whole set, so I now have the total set of options for all 4 squads:

- 4x Lascannons

- 4x Shuriken cannons

- 4x Star cannons

- 4x Missile launchers

- 4x Scatter lasers

Overkill to do all 5 options... just having done 1 option with magnets for models in the past - it's almost always easier to do alternatives at the same time than to go back and do others after the finish of the project. 

With all the initial assembly done over a number of weeks, the guardians here are waiting for a day with the airbrush to work on the priming and green colours. In the past I have used blu tac and pegs when airbrushing full squads. The $15 ebay set of clips I'm hoping will be a little easier to work with. And look more professional :-)

Heads/helmets will get done on another day, as keeping them separate for priming white should make the process much, much easier than having to hand paint white over a dark green.