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Hey folks,

I've been meaning to do this since I picked up a couple packages of West Wind heads a few weeks ago, but when I decided to order some Perry Miniatures American Civil War heads, I figured I'd wait until they arrived and had a chance to check them out.

PERRY MINIATURES

Let's start with the Perry Miniatures heads. I placed my order on Jan. 14th through Perry Miniatures website here: http://www.perry-miniatures.com/ and my order arrived yesterday, January 20th - pretty excellent considering that we're talking about shipping from Nottingham, UK to California. I placed an order for a set of 36 American Civil War heads with slouch hats. I had some ideas for making an ANZAC-themed IG army and had hopes that I could take the heads, use them nearly as-is, with just bending up one side of the slouch hats. Mind you, I took a chance and bought them sight unseen - there's no pic of the sprues on the Perrys' website. But knowing their work on GW models, I had enough confidence in them to do this. Plus for ~$10, I was getting 36 heads. The sprues were well-packaged in a small cardboard box with cotton padding, 6 heads to a sprue - 2 different types of sprues. I imagine they randomly select the sprues that you get, but I got 4 of one kind and 2 of the other. The pic below shows the two sprues.



(I apologize for the quality of this photo - I'm not the best with my macro setting on my camera. The other pics of these models below are better)

So, on each of these two sprues is six individual heads - for a total of 12 different faces and slouch hats, 5 with mustaches, 3 with beards, 4 clean-shaven, and all with different hats. Needless to say, for an ANZAC force, even if I don't sweat the facial hair, the different hats are something of a problem. Don't get me wrong, these are all nice, solid sculpts. But from the start, I'm thinking that these may not be what I need them to be. Then I cut a couple off the sprue that I felt would most easily be usable for ANZAC heads and blutacked them to a Cadian carrying a lasgun - these are seen below.





The other issue that I'm seeing is that the hats may wind up being a bit trickier to deal with than I thought. While I'd hoped I could simply fold up one edge of the brim, it was increasingly looking like that wouldn't be a possibility without some work.





Here's the other thing. Most folks know that GW's models are 28mm Heroic. It doesn't really become that apparent until you see something like this. The heads, unfortunately for converting GW models, are a bit too small. Not substantially - but enough to look...off. While I particularly like the sculpt with the mustache that I used (if I wanted a Cowboy/1800's Cavalry-themed IG force if it were a little larger), these just weren't going to work for my needs.

Perry Miniatures Conclusions
- Great service
- Great prices
- Good sculpts (my pics don't do them justice)
- Limited themes for 40k, but could be very useful for WHFB
- Heads seemed just a little too small to really work with GW minis, though


WEST WIND PRODUCTIONS

I'd been interested in West Wind Productions for a long time - George Spiggot's IG in Carapace w/ West Wind British Paras in Berets really got me wanting to check them out. As I wandered through my FLGS (I moved to the area just recently and so hadn't had a chance to really check the place out before) I found that they carried West Wind minis! They had a lot of Secrets of the Third Reich models, including three blisters from West Wind's Separate Head System (SHS) - British Helmets, German Helmets, and Zombie Heads. I picked up the British and German Helmets as I'd really wanted to see how they looked with IG. Each blister was $6.00 for 20 heads - again, a great deal.



The Brit heads are pretty simple - Tommy-style helmets with gasmasks. Nothing fancy, but the sculpting is solid - you can see the straps from the gasmasks going around the back of the head. Each sprue has 4 heads, each of which is pretty much identical. So when you get a blister, you get 20 identical heads - good stuff for IG. Below is our model Cadian with the head.



It's a little hard to see in the pic, but frankly, the cut of the Cadian's uniform is really complemented by the British head - if you took off the shoulder pads and gave him a bolt action rifle, he'd look like a WWI or WWII Tommy. These would make for extremely easy and characterful Cadians with a simple head swap. On top of it, West Wind also offers British Steel Helmet heads without gasmasks in their WWII SHS line. If I decided to make an army with these, I'd definitely pick up a couple packs of each to mix and match with squads.

The German Helmets with Gasmasks had two different sprues, each with 4 heads. On one, there were 4 roughly identical steel helmets with gasmasks and on the other there was a head with a peaked cap and gasmask, one covered steel helmet with gasmask, one net-covered steel helmet with gasmask, and one steel helmet with the gasmask coming off (pretty impressive sculpt, actually, you can see the wearer's face beneath where the mask is slipping off. While there had been a few strands of flash on the British helmets, with my German helmets, one of the peaked cap heads was attached to the steel helmet head next to it. Otherwise, the casts looked good without too much excess flash.



Next, the Cadian test. The steel helmeted head looked nice on the Cadian, but frankly, Pig Iron's similar Kolony Militia heads do a more striking job than West Wind's German Helmet with Gas Mask. West Wind's is nice, but if I were to do an entire army, I'd go with Pig Iron.



The Peaked Cap, on the other hand, looked sharp. Hellboy fans out there might appreciate that this head looks a lot like Karl Kroenen (for those of you that've only seen the movie - the clockwork dude with the blades). This might be overkill on an entire army, but would look really good on Sgts and Officers (Guess that's why they package 2 of them per 20-head blister.)



Similar to the British helmets, West Wind has a wide selection of other German heads that would all compliment each other if you wanted to have all the heads in your army from a single line, but wanted some diversity.

From a size perspective, they seem a hair smaller than GW's, but then I think that GW's IG heads are slightly too big, so to me, this is a good thing.

West Wind Conclusions
- Great price
- Great sculpts, but for German-style steel helmets, Pig Iron does it better
- Lots of variety in their lines to mine for different IG themes (I'm now wanting to get some of their US steel helmets to try them out on some Catachans!)
- Good size - a hair small, which for me is perfect - IG shouldn't have heads as big as SM


So, there you go, consumers - let me know if you have any questions on these items!

nice report there. someday when I have gobs of cash Ive wanted to start an IG army and do something similar to that.

I would definitely recommend sticking with Pig Iron over West Wind, the detail is far more solid and alot easier to pick out with a brush.

Thank you for the comparison, I'd never seen anyone do those Perry heads before. Looks like they're sculpted to "true 28" scale, somewhere closer to what FW does for their IG miniatures.

Agamemnon2 wrote:Thank you for the comparison, I'd never seen anyone do those Perry heads before. Looks like they're sculpted to "true 28" scale, somewhere closer to what FW does for their IG miniatures.

Yep, compared to what GW does, the Perry's models are definitely "true 28mm". I'm not sure how they'd compare to FW - they'd look awfully funny on a DKoK or Elysian...

looks like their heads were pinched by a giant

yep, heads too small.

So blurry.

Thanks for the report.

This would make a great article start, comparing different heads available from different manufacturers.

Excellent review, thank you!

I am also planning on doing some head swaps for IG when the new codex comes out. I was planning on going Pig Iron, but this is something to think about for special units too. Thanks again!

Death By Monkeys wrote:

Agamemnon2 wrote:Thank you for the comparison, I'd never seen anyone do those Perry heads before. Looks like they're sculpted to "true 28" scale, somewhere closer to what FW does for their IG miniatures.

Yep, compared to what GW does, the Perry's models are definitely "true 28mm". I'm not sure how they'd compare to FW - they'd look awfully funny on a DKoK or Elysian...

That's not exactly what I'm wondering about, more along the lines whether one could use the Perrys' 28mm range as Guardsmen. The plastic cavalry, for example.

Ah, that I don't know about, although I did see a thread while doing a search where someone used the ACW cavalry and cut off the rider at the waist, then using Cadian parts for everything above. They made it sound like it turned out pretty well. I haven't seen any pics, though, so I'm not sure. I think if you were to use straight cavalry from the Perry's range that they would still look small by comparison, though.

Well, not next to MY army, half of which is made up of Rogue Trader plastic Guardsmen (very tiny).

Just as a plug, I've decided against using any of the West Wind or Perry Miniatures for my IG and so have got them up for sale in my trade thread here:

http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/230243.page

Big Update!

I've been meaning to post an update to this thread for awhile but things have been busy and so never got around to it. About a month ago, I was jazzed to go into the store where I got the West Wind heads and find that they had some new ones that I hadn't tried out yet - they had a blister of SOTR US Steel Helmets w/ Gas Mask heads and a blister of British Paratroopers w/ Berets and Gas Mask heads. I picked them up and brought them home, fully intending on writing a full review of them then. I got sidetracked, but in the meantime, decided to order a big batch of Berlin or Bust US Steel Helmets, US Steel Helmets w/ Netting, and British Paratroopers w/ Berets - no gas masks on any of these guys.

In planning my IG army, I was undecided between doing a WWII-era US-style army and a Vietnam-era US-style army. In either case, the US Steel Helmets and British heads with Berets would work nicely - it was mainly a matter of which bodies to use them on - Cadian or Catachan (or for my Drop Troops/Hardened Vets, Diablo-pattern Elysians). Consequently, I'm going to present my review below with each of these heads on different bodies.

Cadian Body - West Wind Heads

Cadian with US Steel Helmet



Cadian with US Steel Helmet and Camo Netting



Cadian with US Steel Helmet and Gas Mask



Cadian with British Paratrooper Beret head



Cadian with British Paratrooper Beret and Gas Mask head




So, similar to my discussion earlier about the West Wind German and British Steel Helmet heads, I really feel like the scale West Wind's heads really complements the Cadian plastic bodies. Are they a little small? Just a little, but I always feel like the Cadian helmets are way too big anyway - these heads have a much more normal feel to them. As far as the level of detail goes, it's good, but not great. You don't realize just how detailed GW minis are until you pick something else up. I think we tend to take it for granted. While I may not like a lot of the facial expressions on GW's bare heads, the detail is good enough for them to have some pretty good facial expressions. The West Wind heads pretty much have closed mouth expression and open mouth expression - mostly closed mouth. It's okay, but it will do for the faceless masses of IG. Personally, I think the US Steel Helmet, US Steel Helmet w/ Netting, and British Beret heads look the best on the Cadians. I feel like the bulkiness of West Wind's Gas Mask heads feels a little clunky. Again, though, compared to Pig Iron, I think Pig Iron does a much better job with their gas mask heads than West Wind. That said, I'll still probably use the West Wind gas mask heads to keep with the theme of the army, either sprinkling them into squads or giving them to my Vets and Storm Troopers.


Catachan Body - West Wind Heads

Catachan with US Steel Helmet



Catachan with US Steel Helmet and Camo Netting



Catachan with US Steel Helmet and Gas Mask



Catachan with British Paratrooper Beret



Catachan with British Paratrooper Beret and Gas Mask




I have to say that I made the mistake of trying the Gas Mask heads on the Catachans first - yipes! Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Unless you're going for a Traitor Guard and awkward is the look you want. The problem with both of the gas mask heads on the Catachans is that 1) West Wind heads are already a little small on GW models - on Catachans even more so; combine this with 2) the fact that you'd expect a head within a gas mask to be even smaller, you're left imagining little tiny pinheads on these steroid-junkie bodies. As such, I was really worried about how the non-gas mask heads would look with the Catachans. And actually, I was pleasantly surprised. While they do look small on the Catachan bodies, they don't look nearly as small as I was afraid they would. They definitely look proportionally smaller when compared to the Cadians (although amusingly if you stand a Cadian and Catachan next to each other the Cadian is taller), but they're not the super pinheads I was afraid they would be. Frankly, I think if you want to do a Vietnam-era/Apocalypse Now-esque IG army using Catachans and West Wind's US Steel Helmet heads, I think you'll have a pretty good looking army. They'll look a little funny, but as long as you use enough of the heads, they'll look funny consistently. And I think when you've got an army of them out there and painted up, folks will ignore the fact that the heads are a little small and instead marvel at how cool having a complete army like that is.


Diablo-Pattern Elysian Body with West Wind Heads

Diablo-Pattern Elysian with Steel Helmet



Diablo-Pattern Elysian with Steel Helmet and Camo Netting



Diablo-Pattern Elysian with Steel Helmet and Gas Mask



Diablo-Pattern Elysian with British Beret




Okay, so, part of the reason I include these guys is to show how the heads look on a less-bulky body. With the Tau-based body (and I also imagine with FW IG bodies), the scale of the West Wind heads fit very nicely. Unfortunately, my positioning of the US Steel Helmet with the Gas Mask was really poor and the picture didn't turn out great, but of all three bodies, I think this head worked the best on the Diablo-Pattern Elysian body. I'm actually pretty stoked to make up a Vet Squad with these bodies and heads. The beret head looks good on this one, too, but I think looks better on the Cadian body.


West Wind Productions - Prices and Shipping

Finally, I want to mention a brief word on West Wind - I'm always a little nervous about ordering from overseas, concerned about shipping costs and time, but with the dollar doing as well as it is now against the British pound, there hasn't been a better time to order from the UK than now. My LGS carries blisters of SHS heads for $6 a pop. Cheap, right? With the exchange rate like it is, by ordering directly through West Wind, I got them for about $4.50 each. With shipping, it came out to just under $6 per blister - and I didn't have to drive to the LGS to get it (which is a fair distance away). So the price was cheaper and the models arrived straight to my door. As far as shipping time went, I ordered early last week, got a confirmation email on Friday that my package had shipped, and the package arrived on Monday. This just makes me even more of a fan of West Wind. So, I highly recommend, if you're building a Guard army and really want some unique heads for cheap, take a hard look at West Wind. I think Pig Iron is still where it's at when it comes to gas mask heads, so if you're going the Traitor route or gas mask route, you should go with them. But for a sheer variety of different heads that you can put together and maintain a cohesive look for your army, I think West Wind takes it.

Every IG player should check out this thread and the gallery

http://www.dakkadakka.com/gallery/images-6005-1827_West%20Wind%20Heads.html

Wow, thanks death by monkeys, that is awesome!

Now I'm temped to use beret heads and steel helmet heads to make a Vietnam era air cav army.

Hmm.

I'm diggin' the gasmasks, and the berets are nice too. Thanks Death by Monkeys. You should definitely turn this into an article, if you havn't yet!

although i dont play IG I just want to thank you for taking the time to post this. Its a VERY useful thread that could well deserve to be sticky in an IG forum.

thanks again for all the effort dude

Phill

Very enjoyable reviews but the pictures were too small (and blurry in the case of the earliest shots) to give me a good look at the models.

I'd really appreciate some larger photos or at least some close-ups of the head/torso area. A bit of black ink would do wonders as well, if I'm going to be super picky .

One last thing- you mention the pig iron heads a few times in the review. A link to some shots of the pig iron heads on guard bodies would be enlightening here. I'm familiar with the pig iron stuff, but many aren't, so this would be helpful.

Great work- I look forward to more photos if you have them

Thank you for the update, DBM. Doubly so because I don't believe even West Wind has pictures of the beret+gas mask combo heads up. I too am surprised how good the Catachan looks with the US steel helmet.

You need to write this up (or copy and paste it) into the Articles system.

Great post... Thanks a lot.