Magnets and Models

As to magnet sourcing, I have had the best luck with K&J Magnetics. I've tried A-1 and also Amazing magnets and I got the best service from K&J - basically they ship orders REALLY fast. I am not a patient person, so not having to wait very long makes me happy.

I don't know if I would pay someone else to magnetize my figs for me, but that's because I already know how to do it myself, and have done extensive magnetic mounting throughout my army. I love me some magnets. :wub:

However, some of my friends have asked me to help them rig up magnetic mounts on their stuff, because they don't have the confidence, skills and/or tools to do it themselves. Also on these forums I often see posts from people who aren't sure how to procede, or are scared they might mess up their valuable fig mounting the magnets. People like this are probably your target market. It seems like magnetic mounting is becoming more popular too, as more and more people find out just how useful it can be. So you may really be on to a great little business idea. Go for it, and let us know how it works out!

Land Speeder with Magnets

Here are pictures of the Land Speeder I put magnets on last night. The magnets are not 1/8" as described in the article I referenced earlier, but are 3/32". Even though they are small, they are quite strong enough to hold the model together. I used a Dremel tool to make the hole to put the magnet in. I also did not use a 1/16" pilot hole as the Dremel couldn't hold such a small bit. The hardest part was putting the magnet in the crew members hands since that piece of plastic was so small. I ended up putting a notch on the inside edge and just putting a lot of super glue in the hole to hold the magnet in place. So here are the pics, and I apolgize for the horrible painting job, this was my first model I painted.

Heavy Bolter with magnet:


Heavy Bolter and Multi-melta with magnets:


Land Speeder with magnet (the magnet is actually larger than the plastic holding the two hands together, so I only notched it from one side so there is still a little plastic in front of the magnet):


Here's the Land Speeder with the Multi-melta attached:


Here's the Land Speeder with the Heavy Bolter attached:


Here is a size comparison for how small the magnet is. Two magnets together are strong enough that when I shook the model as hard as I could, the weapons did not fall off (but another part did, poor glue joint )


A note of caution for those attempting this for the first time, be careful of the polarity of the magnets. It would be really bad if you glued the magnets in only to find out that one is backwards so that the weapon flys off instead of staying put. I used a marker to mark the ends that go together. You can see the ink left on the heavy bolter in the first picture.

After I work on the Predator/Whirlwind I'll post a tutorial on how I did it.

Nice work!

To get around the polarity issues, once I have mounted the first magnet, say in the vehicle itself, I use that magnet to hold the next magnet when I set it into the weapon. (I hold a wooden popsicle stick between the two magnets so the glue won't touch the original magnet, and I can lift the weapon off and set it aside to dry.) That way the polarity is gauranteed to line up. If you are consistant with this you will have all your models done with the polarity lined up the same way - all the guns should be mountable on all the vehicles. I tried going through and painting one terminal (which was pretty hard in and of itself) orange so I'd have a visual indication of the polarity, but I found that the paint chipped off too easily to be reliable.

Speaking of magnets on a landspeeder, a buddy of mine magnetically mounted the torso of the gunner and made another "dead" gunner torso (caught some bolter fire to the chest and head) to swap in when he gets a weapon destroyed results. It's really sweet.