I can confirm RobHistory’s experience. I have heard about the “wash your resin figures with soap and water before painting” and tend to neglect that step. However, when I spray-coated my first resin F:WW minis, I had problems with the primer just flaking right off of some of the more recessed areas. After a bit of scrubbing and another round of priming, I had no further problems.
For trimming, I just use a standard “Exacto” type hobby knife – the sort I can pick up at Walmart, etc.
Although it’s not strictly necessary, I also use a hand-held pinning drill (I think the brand I have is from “The Army Painter”) to drill pin holes in the connecting spots and I use wire to reinforce the joining spots. (For wire, I use paperclips, which happen to be just the right thickness, and I’ve got a ton of them.) The resin drills fairly easily, but of course that means you have to be careful not to drill TOO far into a piece and end up breaking out on the other side, etc.
Overall, I love the quality of the resins – great, sharp detail, wonderful little features here and there on the decorative bases, and they fit together nicely. I’ve sometimes used a bit of “brown stuff” (AKA brown/aluminum ribbon epoxy putty) for gap-filling when there are visible seams at the places where the parts join. (I prefer it to the “green stuff,” since the “brown stuff” has a longer shelf-life, and I only use very small amounts of it at a time.)
The only trouble I’ve had so far would be with the resin Super Mutants – specifically, those with sledgehammers and nail boards. Both weapons have a tendency to warp and bend, or even break off entirely.
I’ve replaced a few sledgehammer handles with paperclip wire – snipping off the original sledgehammer handle, drilling a pinning hole through the hand(s) holding the hammer, and a short pinning hole into the base of the hammer head, then running wire through the whole length. If I don’t “skin” the paperclip (i.e., leave the acrylic coating on), it’s pretty close to the original thickness of the sledgehammer handle, and looks decent on the figure.
The nail boards are more problematic, since you can’t just the fragile parts with wire, and the board portion is too thin to be pinned (at least too thin for ME to manage it). For the figures where I’ve had the nail boards break off or bend beyond hope, I’ve just been replacing them with other “scrap” weapons cobbled together from pieces in my “bitz box” – typically plastic medieval weapon spares left over from other miniatures games, that I chip a bit with the hobby knife and use some putty and super glue gel to add bits of “wrapping” or “scrap metal” and “rivets” so it looks more like something that could have been cobbled together out of scrap, rather than a beefy fantasy world weapon.
