A Little Project: Necron Guns

After picking up a large group of Necron miniatures at a car boot sale a couple of weeks ago. I discovered that the Necron Warriors were missing the green light gathering rods from their guns.

My first thought was that this reduced the usefulness of the purchase, but it then immediately struck me that this was a good opportunity to add some variety to the figures. There are enough figures to make up three squads, so I decided to define them by giving them different coloured rods.

I ordered up some light gathering rods from 4D Modelshop and then started to sort out how to cut them. I had one of the existing rods from the miniatures, so I measured it's length, 15.25mm. Now I didn't really want to hand cut 36 pieces, mainly due to the issues with getting them all accurate and also it would be nice not to have to clean up the end to the rods, so that the light gathering properties of the rods can really show through.

I resorted to using the laser cutter. I made up a quick jig and it worked out really well.

This, rather poor, photo shows the jig in position.

You can see what happens in this short video.

 

So, I was soon turning out rods cut to the perfect length. When laser cut, acrylic gives a nice polished finish so there was no clean up afterwards either.

I also decided to drill a small hole in the end of the Necrons guns to allow the light gathered in the rods to shine through, which you can just about see in the rather badly focused photo.

I have only placed the rods in position here, as I still plan to do quite a bit of work to the paint job. Unfortunately the Green rods from 4D Modelshop were quite pale, and in some light they are difficult to tell apart from the Yellow rods. They are certainly paler that the original GW ones. I may need to try to source some more green ones from a different supplier.

So, that's another little project successfully completed.