Yooz might find dis order a bit…shokkin’!

Rotkop, Kommando Comms Boy

When I started assembling the Kommando Comms Boy, I thought this was going to be a model without any LEDs. <pause for audience laugh> However just as I finished gluing it together, I realised there was a giant light bulb on the side of his shokka pistol! I couldn’t let that go unmodified, so I dutifully took the miniature apart and began to plan how to replace the plastic light bulb with a functioning LED.

Design & Building

The LED process was fairly simple by my standards. I cut the bulb from the shokka pistol with a sharp craft knife, and then used a 1mm drill bit to drill out the “glass” parts of the bulb, leaving the “metal” guard around it. I then inserted a 3V red ultra nano SMD chip LED where the bulb was, running the wire down through the pistol, right arm, torso and leg to the battery in the base. Once the LED was in place I returned the “metal” guard to cover it – as shown in the image above – and filled in the gaps between the guard with Water Splash Effect Gel (available from Green Stuff World) to provide a transparent replacement for the “glass” in the bulb. Finally, once the gel was dry I applied a shade of Citadel Spiritstone Red. This ‘Technical’ paint is like a thick, glossy glaze, and helps the gel to look like red glass when the LED is switched off. 

If you’d like to have a go at this yourself but you’d like more details, I’m afraid I don’t have a full tutorial for this technique at the moment. But the existing tutorial that is closest is my ‘Simple LED Muzzle Flare‘ tutorial, only with the red ultra nano SMD chip LED mentioned above, instead of the yellow 0805 chip LED shown in the tutorial.

That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading, and hopefully see you again soon for the tenth and final Kommando in the Octarius Kill Team!