There's always those models that elude your grasp for too long a time. Whether it be because of the price or the rarity, we all have them. For me, it's always been the Skink Starseer. I find the price (at the time of this writing) at $50 for a single character to be too high, especially at this size and material choice. Because you see, this model used to be cast in metal. Which would be ok, but GW in the modern era has replaced the metal with their homebrew resin/plastic mix which they call Finecast. And I dislike Finecast.
You can look up all the various things wrong with Finecast all over the internet. You may think to yourself, it's all exaggerated. You'd be right. It's not the worst thing out there, but it does suck to work with and it has bubbles all over and is that a part of the model or the sprue dear god I cut off a detail. Not to mention all of the warping that I had to deal with.
Those last two parts are truly where the annoyance working with this model was. You can see little specks along the back of the cape in the above picture. The model is covered in these, and some of them are big and in bad places. There's a big ol hole right on his foot, that I didn't fill in because I didn't discover it until after I had started painting. This is the same with all of these little triangular tags all over the model. These help in the manufacturing process, but if you think you got them all, think again, because one will show up and it'll only be obvious once a paint layer and a wash have been applied.
So after a lot of that, I finally got it painted. I will say that the Finecast palanquin was much easier to balance on its flight stand than a metal one. I have an old metal Kroak that still threatens to fall off from time to time, so this was a lot nicer.
Of course, if you're buying a model at a premium, don't you think it should be in a better condition than this? It does beg the question, and I hear the same thing asked when it comes to Forge Worlds pricing and history of warped models. But as long as we buy stuff at this price, it'll keep happening right? Although I did buy mine on Ebay, so do I have a clean conscience? I think so.
Well you did a nice job with the miniature but I k ow exactly what you mean! It’s been awhile since I purchased anything from GW or Forge World but I get pissed when I feel like I pay a lot for a miniature and find that it has problems. And I think I probably could of paid half the price for something similar with a little less detail but probably around the same issues. 😀
ReplyDeleteUgh it's frustrating that a supposedly premium product has such defects, so that's why a lot of the time I get this kind of stuff on Ebay haha.
Delete