Forge World V’s other Resin Producing Companies

[BobbieTheDamned]

The main cost in resin miniatures will be human labour cost, resin stuff is all done in soft moulds that have to be set up by hand and demoulded for every cast, whereas plastics are just spat out by a machine. Even with white metal stuff you can cast a whole load of bits on one go (with a spin caster anyway) can't do that with resin.

:P Plus FW is owned by GW why shouldn't it be expensive? I am tempted to buy one of the FW razorbacks though, the turret is SO much nicer than the GW one.

[Billiam Babble]

It doesn't seem that long ago (two decades at least...) that anything not made from white metal was considered low quality in terms of detail.  All hail the new flesh of plastic and resin!

I remember chatting with some GW staff (10 years ago-ish) who explained to me that plastic airfix style sprue kits were like mass card printing - you had to produce many thousands in order to justify the cost of the machinery. So in the beginning (simple plastic squads aside) it was only the very popular basic rhino shells etc which were made of plastic (am I right?) - which used to have large flat strips of armour, and scenery walls which make sense in those types of moulds, but I'm sure the technology has moved on.  

I was looking at those bases - I really like these skulls! http://www.shop.microartstudio.com/skulls-c-3_34.html

I'm wondering if those stone wall straights would be worth modifying for indoor dungeon use (sorry if repeating self)
I tried some latex moulding of plaster of paris a while back, the original was made from GW castle walls packed with plasticine, messy and flimsy, I can see why expensive resin scenery seems worth the price after a many slow weekends with stinky messy materials, which don't always setting uniformly - god knows what I'd be like with metal or resin casting!  Rob's point about human-labour cost seems to ring true here, I think if I had the cash I'd rather give it to the experts, especially when large quantities of scenery are concerned. ;)  Thanks for the price comparison pointers - I wouldn't know where to start.

(says the man who is trying to perfect free printable cardboard retro-scenery, partly because he's tight  ;) )

[Saw]

I know this is a little off topic, but for indoor dungeoun use I would consider casting in plaster. the price is right, once you but the molds, you can get up to 50 great castings if you take care of them. You can also get some great detail with mixing in some "jetdry" dishwashing water softener into the plaster mix. is helps break up the bubbles, and form more into the mold.

This company has some great molds ,if your not already aware of them:

http://www.hirstarts.com/index.html

Hope this help,

Saw

[Spurticus Rex]

As far as I've seen, its pretty much as Robert said, its down to the cost of production and that the moulds being silicone or latex rubber don't last for more than 20 or so castings, then a new mould has to be made from the master.
Thats the same for all resin producers though.
One area where they seem to be a better producer is that they seem to vacume de-gas their resin before using it, it means there are few imperfections or bubbles in the finished model.
Having built lots of resin models, they have better quality than many others, maybe they know this and charge accordingly, but who knows.
What they have started doing is producing multi media kits, I've seen several new baneblade kits and the vulture gunship kit have dropped in price slightly because they used plastic parts from the baneblade and valkarie kits.
All in all though, compared with other companies, making other genre's of resin models, their prices are pretty much in the middle ground.

[MortiS-the-Lost]

I first wrote this article to directly compare FW’s prices with those of other companies producing similar products in the same martial (Resin) and thus only compared them to other resin products. But despite this pretty direct comparison at lot of people still seem to be under the impression that that resin-casting is some how an expensive process.

What I’m going to do now is site 3 examples of why this is really not the case

First of all, have a look round the Grendel Products on the Scotiagrendel website.
http://www.scotiagrendel.com/Products/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=2
Grendel have been making both Fantasy and Sci-fi resin since at least the late 80’s (and maybe even earlier) you can spot a lot of their products in old gaming magazines. Most of their sets, even the fairly large ones, cost less than £15 (bear in mind your hard pushed to find anything under £15 from FW) and a lot their sets are around the £6 mark. Also they very high quality pieces (I own quite a lot of their products and will eventually post some pictures) and the level of detail is brilliant (almost surprising considering how old their product line are). Unfortunately Grendel is rather let down by the quality of pictures on their website, but don’t knock Grendel products until you’ve really seen some, in fact I dare everyone here on tLatD to order one of their sets (their cheap, what do you have to loose?).

Still convinced resin is expensive to produce? Go into your local nik-nac store, Gift/Souvenir Shop or anywhere that you find cheap ornaments of wizards and dragons and the like (at lot of these seem to turn up in teenage girls bedrooms). Take note of the prices and the level of detail (also take into account the cost of the numerous glass orbs hot-glued to them).  

And finally some text stolen from the Eolith Miniatures website, where Steve Buddle explains that he now produces resin miniatures because it costs him less and is higher quality.

www.eolithminiatures.com wrote

Resin... why resin?

Well, there was the initial reason that it suited my business model better than metal but resin is awesome stuff for minis.

I love the lack of shrinkage. When you cast in metal the figure shrinks and flattens slightly and can end up not really looking quite as the sculptor intended. Resin castings are as close to the original sculpt as you can realistically get. And that means that multipart figs tend to fit together better.

Surface. I love that you have the lovely smooth surface on resin rather than the often rough quality on metal, particularly on larger pieces (my 54mm Dracula would have been nowhere near as nice in metal).

Weight. It weighs very little. Now I know some people like the weighty feel of metal but that can be aproximated by adding a coin or similar under the base. The upsides to the lack of weight are that I can ship less expensively and, from a modelling perspective, multipart figs require less pinning.

Ahhh resin. I genuinely believe it's the best choice for single miniatures as I sell...

I'll give metal the benefit of the doubt for producing units and armies though it's got a bit too expensive to be a bargain...

... and the setup costs for plastic are enormous.