Editing Guide to Assembling Models (section)

=== 3rd Party Parts ===
Nobody in this hobby can be expected to be an expert sculptor, or a genius with the hobby knife.  If you want a model, or better yet ''every model'', in your army to have stand-out wargear, than you should consider buying bits from [[Model_Alternatives#Proxy_Companies|3rd party model makers]]!  Many businesses specialize in making body parts, weapons, and armor which are compatible with existing lines of wargaming models.  These products provide a different look for your models, one which may fit better with your army concept or '''a e s t h e t i c'''.  And these parts can often be bought in bulk, which means that you don't have to spend hours and hours sculpting the same part onto 20 different models!

This aspect of customization only requires slightly more skill than assembling models.  Why might swapping in 3rd party parts be a bit tougher than basic assembly?  Well... let's just say that not every alternate parts shop will have that patent-pending "Games Workshop Quality".  In fact, none of them will.  Most of these companies can only produce parts with "less-than-modern" QA standards, or worse.  They often cast parts in resin or pewter, which will carry fine details better but make such parts tougher to work with than, say, the modern lines of all-plastic Games Workshop models.  Expect to deal with flash, erratic sprue, and severe mould lines.  If you have experience making [[Forge_World#Company|Forge World]] models, play games from [[Privateer Press]], or are a [[Neckbeard|greybeard]] who made models for 4th Edition 40k or earlier, you can readily deal with the hiccups of 3rd party models just fine.