MAGNETIC CITADEL PAINTING HANDLE HACK

by bish · April 19, 2018

I love the Citadel Painting Handle, for the price it’s a great piece of kit to have in your modeling/painting equipment. But it only holds up to a 40mm base. One of the things I’ve been working on since getting back into the hobby is magnetizing all my miniatures with rare earth magnets and making magnetic carrying cases for them (I’ll do a post about the cases sometime in the future). One of the great things about the Citadel Painting Handle is that you can remove the handle part and it has a standard tripod screw, so I decided I needed to come up with a way to use my magnetized miniatures and the handle together. It would be particularly beneficial for my miniatures larger than 40mm

As you can see in the gallery below, this is what I came up with. I found from an eBay seller a 6″ diameter 1/16″ thick steel disc. This would be big enough to fit any of the large based miniatures that I own, as you can see a Great Unclean One fits fine on it. (It’s important to note that you should not get stainless steel as a lot of Stainless Steel is not magnetic, I found out the hard way.) Then after a lot of searching I found the Guerrilla Painter Tripod Mount on Amazon. it’s basically an aluminum plate with a standard tripod screw mount attached to it. Its a little expensive but it was perfect for what I needed. I then used Loctite Epoxy Metal/Concrete to bond the tripod mount to the steel disc. This epoxy makes a very strong bond. After letting it cure for a day I screwed the plate to the Citadel Painting Handle and voilà, I can use my Citadel Painting Handle with all my magnetized miniatures, even the ones on a 130mm base. I can also put multiple smaller miniatures on it if I’m assembly line painting. I’m really happy with how it turned out, and as you can see it creates a strong enough magnetic bond to hold up a giant blob of resin as big as the Forge World Great Unclean One!

I hope someone finds this useful! Let me know in the comments!

(I should add that while I normally play Dark Angels and this site has always been mostly about Dark Angels, I’ve also always liked Nurgle. So you will be seeing both my armies along with other non-Dark Angels projects on here in the future.)