Thursday, November 1, 2012

Salvaging a few F-Cast minis for Bilbo's Bash


Well, here are those freakin' finecast figures I mentioned in last night's post.  The production value on the casts was brutal.  They were almost unpaintable, especially the figure on the left.  I could have painted 4 miniatures in the time I struggled with that one!


There was not a single element that was not miscast or badly sculpted.  It also had very heavy pitting texture on the cloak, which was ridiculous.  Even with pins, the back legs kept bending and collapsing.


The war priest was not as bad, but still had a ton of errors.  It was a bummer, since these guys were supposed to be an important part of the army, with lots of freehand.  These were so bad, I had to abandon almost all the freehand that I wanted to do.


The helmets were so nasty, I had to use an exacto knife to shave down parts of them so that they had an actual shape.


Sorry to be so crabby here!  It was very frustrating to lose so much precious painting time to stuff that should not even be an issue in the first place!


From now on, I will either be converting plastic or metal figs I find on ebay, or subbing appropriate Reaper  or Foundry figures.  It was way more fun to do my banner bearer and war drum that way!

8 comments:

  1. I can not believe GW has allowed this FineCast mess to go on as long as it has. They are going to put themselves out of business! Between 0 custumer appretiation, high prices and crappey finecast. I also am looking to the many other mini companies out there. Maybe GW will get the hint!

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    1. It is the length of time with no improvement and even further backsliding of quality that is the most disturbing. Especially with casts that were done exclusively in F-Cast, rather than the metal converts...

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  2. I feel your pain!!! I have had problems with F-cast in every model I have bought. Recently I painted Ghazghkull and it took at least a week to fix it, and in the end I noticed several micro bubbles when I was already airbrushing it, too late!!


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    1. When I work on a new F-Cast figure that I am not at all familiar with, I end up not knowing that some significant part of the thing is not even there until it is too late! Grrr...

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  3. F-cast. It's the reason I won't buy the new dark apostle - even though i love the sculpt and think they nailed the look. The new aspiring champion is plastic though...

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    1. It is very sad how that poor quality has affected all of our hobby choices...

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  4. Yeah, I stopped buying Dark Eldar after my first two finecasts..
    And now i buy only if i can get second hand first issue metals.. but only part of the models were done in metal ;(

    They were like yours- salvageable, but not quality for that price..

    And I realized that Urien is miscast only after painting him (he missed part of his weapon)

    But i heard you can exchange bad sculpts for new blister no question asked now.

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    1. Their strategy is that for most folks, the exchange is going to take a lot of time, and may have to go through multiple blisters to find one that is not a disaster. They count on that customer just giving up and not wanting to deal with the mess. Very sad.

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