Tutorial Guide to magnetize a Stegadon

Hey everyone! If you've seen my previous blog on magnetizing Stegadons, then consider this the new and improved 2.0 guide. I'll be covering how to magnetize your Stegadon for all loadouts and some practices I've learned along the way.

What you'll need

• A base with a larger magnet, glued or sticky tacked on. This will be known as your reference base. The reference base is the assumed direction of your howdah, the top of the magnet is what your skinks and stegadon bits will be attaching to on the howdah.
  
  
• 1mmx1mm magnets (about 10). These will be referred as skink magnets.
• 2mmx1.5mm magnets (about 20). These magnets will be used on the Stegadon bits as they hold much stronger than the 1mmx1mm. These will be referred as stegadon magnets.
• A drill and various sized bits.
• A bit of greenstuff (only to fix mistakes)

Getting Started

• Assemble all of your skinks
  • Assemble both the priest and skink chief as well.
• Assemble your stegadon as a single dinosaur.
• Assemble all of the pieces as you see fit.

NOTE: All magnetizing will occur BEFORE priming. I failed to take all the necessary pictures, so some photos will be of magnets in painted models.

All assembled bits looks a bit like this:

Magnetizing - Skinks

Setup
Your Stegadon kit will come with 7 skinks.

• 1 Priest
• 1 Chief
• 5 crew

Three of the crew members have longer tails while two have shorter, stubbier tales. The following will be magnetized

• The priest
• The chief
• 3 of the crew (two stubby tails and one longer tail)
  • A stubby tail skink will be always glued onto the crossbow.

Two longer tailed skinks will be glued on once painted.

Magnetizing the skinks
Use your drill bit to drill holes in the feet of your priest and chief. Be careful as if you drill too far, you'll go right through the foot. The magnets might not fit fully in the foot, but this is OK, as it will only hang out maybe 20% of a mm out. Sometimes the foot might separate a little, but this is OK as it's hardly visible, and can sometimes be fixed with a bit of greenstuff.

When you're ready to insert your remember to place your smaller magnet onto your reference magnet. The reference magnet will be as if its in your howdah, so make sure your skink magnet is on the reference BEFORE gluing. Sometimes I like to put a small bit of super glue on the skink magnet after placing it on the reference, then slot the drilled hole over the skink magnet, so I know for a fact it's how I want it.

In this image, magnets are in both feet, and are sticking how I want them too according to the reference base


Skink bow operator
For this skink, you only need a magnet in his back right foot, as we'll be putting in magnets in the front of the crossbow.


Remaining crew
Drill holes in both feet and apply magnets.


With all of these done, we can move onto the Stegadon bits

Magnetizing - Stegadon bits

The Howdah/Stegadon
Apply your magnets as follows. Remember to use your reference!



When you've magnetized your howdah, it will look like this without the skinks (remember, we're gluing on two long tailed skinks)


With all magnetized skinks

 

All other bits
Engine piece
I used some greenstuff to give the magnets a bit more of a hold. You could use any other modelling putty as a filler (whether it's clay, terracotta, doesn't really matter)


For the front, I added in two for the feet of the skink priest. As to why I didn't glue it: I can put the skink priest on a separate base for game or display purposes.


Flag poles (optional)
I only magnetized these for transportation purposes. This is a skippable option. I shaved down the connecting pieces for the flags and added the magnets. In the future, I'm wondering if it would be better to glue them together then snip them to

Crossbow
Two magnets in the metallic parts.


Arrow container (optional)
One magnet in the back.


Decorative side panel (optional, used for when we want the Engine of the Gods loadout)


Crest for Engine.


Flame spitters

 

The loadouts

Stegadon with bow


Stegadon with Flame throwers


Engine of the Gods

 

I hope this helps with future magnetizing If you need help, reach to me on the Seraphon discord!

 

This is a great help. I have my stegadon(beast) built and am still not sure how to tackle the howdah and Crew... this helps figuring out what I need to complete the job.

Grrr, !mrahil

 

@LordBaconBane Hi.

So I am working on the stegadon now and also wanted to try maximize its variance with magnets. I stumbled upon your thread which made me want to make this possible aswell, but I have a couple doubts now that I'm in front of the plastic.

So for WHF 8th edition army book the crew seems to be x5 for every variant. With your solution it seems that 5 skinks is only possible for the base variant (giant crossbow). Is it because you had to compromise and the kit doesn't allow enough flexibility to magnetize 5 skinks on every variant? or another reason?

Another question is: Do you use the same magnet placements for both the crossbow and the Engine front decorative piece? it seems to make sense to me but its not 100% clear how you did it.

Thanks for the thread. The images and the detailed explanation is amazing and helps me a lot.