Magnetizing a Stormwall / Hurricane, Part Deux

I always knew that assembling and painting a colossal would take a long time. I didn't think it would take this long. I started in March, and I'm still not done assembling it. It's true that I get less than an hour a couple nights a week to spend on this, and there was a vacation to factor in as well as the fact that I'm generally watching TV and drinking while I work on the model. I also took a break from the colossal to build that Khador Bunker. I guess that's why it's taking this long.

My magnets arrived, and I immediately realized that I'd ordered magnets that were about half the size of what I'd wanted. Whoops. Well, let's see what I can do with them.

I decided to use two magnets for the big guns, and two magnets for the wrist-covers. During the process, I glued one in backwards, but I was fortunately able to pry it out and re-glue it. Even with two magnets, and even trying to make direct metal-to-metal contact, it's not a strong hold. They won't fall off unless you shake the model fairly hard though, so I'm calling it good.

I found that the only way to get the positioning on the arc node / stormhat correct was to first drill the hole in the colossal's head and glue in a magnet, leaving it protruding a bit. Then, put fresh green stuff in the inside of the arc node, put a loose magnet atop the protruding magnet, and place the part on top, allowing the magnet to mark an indent in the green stuff. This marked where I had to sink the magnet and attach it to the arc node. This allowed the piece to sit perfectly in position, and I'm very happy with the result.

I'd ordered much larger magnets for the waist and arms, and the one I'd intended for the waist turned out to be just barely too large to fit through the hole into the colossal's crotch area for the bottom magnet in the waist pair. So I glued it in place as best I could, and didn't realize until the glue had cured that I really really wasn't happy with the result. As you can see from the photo, even after a ton of work with a razor blade and file, it wasn't easy to get that magnet out.

Once I did, I looked at different options to magnetize the waist, and managed to fit that big magnet inside the crotch cavity by pushing it inside sideways with plyers. I apologize if that sounds like some torture scene out of a movie. Then, I drilled a hole in the top and got a magnet in place there, but now there was too much play in the bottom magnet - it was loose in there, as attaching it to the top wouldn't allow for the top pin to slide down far enough, and attaching it to the bottom of that cavity wouldn't allow the magnets to touch. I'm starting to seriously considering just gluing the damn waist in place.

The storm pods have two flower petal like pieces which attach via tabs, and I'd originally made an error and clipped off one of the tabs on one of them. Thankfully, I was able to drill tiny holes and use a paper clip to attach it, and you pretty much can't even tell. I've actually got the storm pods 80% painted already.