A few thoughts, in no particular order:
- The article is a bit heavy on the emphasis on sculpting versus other forms of customization. Personally I am not much of a sculptor at all–I’ve always been poor at working GS.
- An outstanding place to get these tools and more is MicroMark. Even just browsing you can get a feel for what the possibilities are.
- For smoothing cut surfaces, my preference is for 2000 grit sandpaper followed by very light and careful use of a Dremel felt polishing tip.
- I find the Dremel Stylus to be much easier to control than a full-size Dremel, cordless, and with lower speeds that are more suitable to working ABS without melting it.
- You will almost always want to use CA (cyanoacrylate) glue for joins. This is the same thing as “super” or “crazy” glue, and it is available in a variety of viscosities and drying times. I particularly like something called “Zap-a-gap”, which is more fluid rather than gel-like.
- The primary purpose of pinning is to add strength in a way that counters the weakness of CA glue. CA is extremely strong at resisting normal stress (being pulled apart), but it is much weaker at resisting shear (twisting or side-to-side motion). Pinning the join makes it impossible to move the piece side to side, and if there is enough room to use two pins it is impossible to twist. A nice trick for lining things up properly is to glue the pin into one side, then line up the two pieces and use the exposed end of the pin to push a slight divot into the other part, which gives you a shallow pilot hole for drilling.
- I don’t like using actual pins for “pinning”. Pins tend to be steel that is either chromed or plated with nickel or another substance to harden and stiffen them, which makes them less flexible and difficult to work and prone to snapping and flying around when you cut them. My material of preference for this purpose is paper clips, which are cheap in bulk and easy to work with, and can be shaped fairly easily as needed.
- I find it’s very helpful to pick a particular kind of paper clip and stick with it–a little box of them will probably last you your entire customization career, since you’re usually using no more than 1/4 inch at a time at most. Then you can find the drill bit that exactly matches the diameter, make a note of it and mark the bit in some way so that you can always find it quickly.
- While you rightly recommend plasticard (a particular brand) for armor panels and the like, I would expand that to recommend styrene stock in general. You can do some amazing scratchbuilding work using styrene rods, blocks, and other shapes beyond thin card stock.