scratchbuilding, building something from scratch, or in my case, building something from:
-Foamcard
5mm thick foamcard bought from hobbycraft, its really easy to cut and draw on. i use it to make the basic structure of a war machine. then i detail it with plasticard.
if you use it, you need to use a REALLY sharp knife to avoid the foam bunching. -you’ll get what i mean.
-plasticard
i use 1mm for most of my construction. use a metal ruler and a knife and lightly score a straight line, then snap it cleanly in two. when you have the desired shape, drag your knife along the edges to angle them and rough them up a bit. add nicks and bullet holes all over. apply rivets (more detail later) and add glyphs!
i use 0.5mm plasticard if i need to bend it or to make glyphs with as it is easier to cut. it also adds variety to the thickness of the armour plates used.
-Rivets
large rivets:
i use a leather hole punch on 1mm plasticard to produce large rivets, used mainly for my Gargant. using this is a very fast and effective method for producing lots of identical rivets for large war machines.
medium rivets:
Roll some greenstuff into a thin sausage to the width you want (can usually get these to “medium rivet” size but no smaller) and let it dry. later cut it into slices and you have your rivets. decent method used on my battlewagon/skullhamma but be patient as the greenstuff needs time to dry.
small rivets:
there are two methods i use:
1- you can get a special rivet tool which acts like a pizza slicer at various websites. it applies rivets on the reverse side of 0.5mm plasticard. I replicate this by pushing a biro pen firmly onto the reverse of my 0.5mm plasticard, it works really well for normal 40k vehicles. (warning however don’t do this too close to corners as if done incorectly it may bend the plastic edges, though you can bend them back.)
2- one of my new favourite methods, i was pondering how to make small rivets if only plasticard was to hand, my answer is as follows:
Take 1mm thick plasticard and mark along it a few 1mm lines. cut these carefully out so you now have very fine rods which are a 1mm by 1mm square in profile. Next take your craft-knife and gently drag the blade backwards across the corners of the square on all 4 corners until you eventually have more of an 8 sided octagon profile (this sounds long and complicated though in reality it takes less than a minute.) You can try sanding the corners rather than using a knife although the knife in my experience is quicker. you should now have an octagon profiled long length of plasticard rod, cut it finely and this one rod will produce many hundreds of rivets. EFFECTIVE! -i use for applying to all small features, can work on individual models such as hand-held weapons, deffkoptaz.. it can also be used for smaller, more detailed rivets on war machines when the gargant sized ones are just too big!
gluing rivets:
I apply rivets with super-glue, i’ve heard there are many ways to glue them. i just can’t stand having rivets fall off when painting, so i use super glue to cut this to a minimum.
-Magnets
magnets are absolutely brilliant in all 40k building, especially in vehicles and war machines. you can make your turrets rotate easily, have vehicles which can come apart for storage, have interchangable upgrades/weapons/sections e.t.c. the list is endless.
don’t however use any old magnets, they are not powerful enough, buy earth magnets from ebay. i use mainly 4m accross as i can punch holes for them with my rivet puncher (handy!) although i use larger ones for heavier equipment (e.g. gargant shoulders.) I urge you to make an ebay account even if it’s just to buy these and plasticard, because they are so good for modeling with. take my looted wagons for example: bar one, they can interchange their turrets with eachother. each one can alternate their weapons. riggers, bolt on big shootas and grabba claws can all be attached.
buy them! don’t be fooled by their small size, they are very powerful.
hope you find this useful, i sure wish i’d seen this when i embarked on my scratch building quest! 
