Pinning made easy

These large pewter models i keep working on often require pins that will hold them together in the end.

Some parts are very easily pinned, while for some other parts its pretty hard to judge where to drill so the part will fit properly

You can see on these photos that i did have a few attempts at pinning this leg before i figured out how to get it right :)

Here I drilled the hole that will be used for the actual pinning:

The main trick is to properly lubricate the drilled hole, and stick a little blob of blu-tack in it (I used my own spit to lubricate it. Its gross but its organic and free :P).

Press the piece that needs to be pinned in it's place firmly

And when you pull it out the blu-tack should be stuck exactly where you need to drill on the other side.

Carefully drill through the blu-tack (no photo here since i sorta needed two hands to drill :))

Brass rod is attached here to the piece, and its always wise to file the brass itself since the cutter will deform it.

It fits perfectly with the pin :) (unlike the previous botched attempts)

The arm was a lot easier to pin since the piece is big, and the socket gives a lot of room to rotate the arm. First I drilled a hole in the arm, glued the brass rod in it, pressed firmly to the socket in position I wanted to have. Brass rod scored the socket, and i had my mark for drilling.

The leg joint was filled with green stuff since the fit wasn't perfect to begin with.

When working with green stuff to fill gaps, remember that less is more. I always end up with random balls of green stuff that wasnt used for anything (this is fortunately not too bad since they can be cut and filed to look like rocks :)).

And the satyr is all pinned, glued and filled. After the green stuff is cured I can prime it, and go on with painting :)