Is Finecast going the way of the dinosaurs? Looks like it based on rumors from the ever-reliable Hastings on Warseer.
75hastings69 from Warseer:
Starfarer suggests that GW will go pretty much 100% plastic. They are presenting (or getting together the presentation) that FineCAST was only ever a stop gap, and that plastic is the real future.....
Plastic may well be the future, but not if its all angular CAD sculpted soul-less crap, with increasingly less detail..... that's not the future, I can buy that kind of cartoony crap now from PP!
Plastic is my medium of choice, so I applaud a move to all plastic.
This all plastic rumor shouldn't be attributed to me, I'm just passing on what I've heard.
Now this makes total sense. Finecast has been a Quality Control nightmare for Games Workshop. And injection molded plastic has become cheap to make. The 15mm World War II gaming segment, dominated by Battlefront and Flames of War, is seeing a major change as companies from Europe are injection molding tanks and selling them at 20-25% of what Battlefront charges for their resin versions. I have friends who won't buy Battlefront models because they get the injection molded tanks so cheap. Of course, there is no copyright on World Word II tanks!
Injection molding could also lower the prices on Games Workshop individual models.
Not that Games Workshop wants to lower prices on anything....
Loken.
5 comments:
Glad to hear it I refused to buy any model that was in finecast, might even buy the obyron mini now instead of using a pariah. But I doubt will see a reduction in price if this rumour is true
Hopefully the plastic spures will come with a bunch of options; head and weapon swaps and extra doodads and folderol.
Finecast was supposed to be a band-aid, a temporary solution to the increase in price of metals as well as creating a faster process to manufacture high volume models, which is why not everything in metal was replaced with finecast.
There will probably be new sculpts for the models as well, doing new sculpts is important for two reasons, 1. the molds are old and require a new fresh look to accompany the changing hobby, the second is mechanical.
The mechanical issues are are simple, the molds for metal and fine cast are the same, the material is poured in and spun in a machine, while plastic is stamped out, the plastic also costs less and machines can make one sprue every 3 seconds while metal takes more time, and finecast requires less time, but not as fast as plastic.
Rumors like these have been floating around the water cooler for a while but it made sense with the recent replacement of Chaos Raptors, Flamers of Tzeentch, and possibly more soon.
Yes Finecast is very detailed, however it has a strange feel to it. There plastics are much better
Don't forget plastics are based on petrochemicals, which are going to be increasingly expensive. If GW are not careful they will lock themselves into a rising supply chain cost...
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