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Hi Guys,

I have come to the end of my tether regarding finecast models I have sent a complaint to GWS to see if they actually care about the poor quality of these figures. I want to know what your thoughts are and if you have pictures of figures that you have had that are of bad quality.

If we have to pay £15 per figure we as a consumer and fan should expect to be getting quality products.

As one person I doubt they will listen but if I get enough examples maybe we can make a difference, lets find out if they actually care about us...

Recently I noticed the Finecast lightning claws for Sternguards are warped/bent, even in the GW display pictures on their site....Makes you wonder what they'll turn out like IRL.

Bloody hell! The rest of set isn't much better either. What a hideous and clumsy-looking set of sculpts!

http://www.games-workshop.com/gws/catalog/productDetail.jsp?catId=cat440277a&prodId=prod1710018a

It's true!
http://www.games-workshop.com/gws/catalog/productDetail.jsp?catId=cat440277a&prodId=prod1710018a


Automatically Appended Next Post:
To OP: I'm pretty sure that all you would have to is show them that pic and they'll send you another one for free. Granted the point is you shouldn't have to in the first place.

Luckily I've only bought a few Finecast models so far and I've generally had pretty good casts. Out of around the 12 finecast models I've bought the only real problem I've found was on a 'loincloth' for one of the sternguard, it had a few small holes in it but I just made them look like battle damage so I wasn't too upset. Although I have seen a lot of finecast errors on my friends or other forum users models.

I'm disappointed really that finecast turned out this way, when I originally heard that the metal models were being replaed with resin I was pretty excited (I hate metal models ). Though so far finecast has been a pretty big let down. I would have hoped for more forgeworld like quality of resin. (Although I've had one or two mistakes/bad sculpts from them too) but nowhere near as bad as finecast and far less frequently.

Although if I had recieved something like that I would be pretty disappointed/angry. Best thing to do is take that to your local, or send GW that picture and you should get a free replacement straight away I'd think.

Finecast has steadily improved since release -- latest pic of the sternguard components not withstanding.

When buying finecast, take it out of the blister before you leave the store. In front of the guy who is taking your money. If it's crap, get another one and check it. Rinse and repeat as necessary.

Lately, I've only seen the bad ones in retailers that don't sell that much finecast. So, it's probably old stock. I've purchased around 30+ finecast figures and all of the problems were early on.

Of course, you could just call GW and let them send you a new one.

My god those sternguard weapons are hideous. Do they understand how weapons work? Because I'd imagine most of those combiweapons would explode the first time they were fired.

As for finecast, I deliberately only buy the older metal models. At least with them, I know they won't have defects as often, and they often look a lot cooler than the new molds...

... and they won't melt in your car, and they're not toxic.

I don't like metal models either, and let's not get too rosy about their quality either. I've recently gotten a batch of 20 metals that required a fair bit of work fixing problems with them before I was comfortable priming them.

That said, the switch to finecast resin was a downgrade, end of. Same price for an inferior product. I don't know how much money GW is really making off of them, as it appears that half of what they produce is waste (things done so poorly that they have to be sent back).

In any case, as mentioned, I got some metal minis recently. I specifically wanted to have them BEFORE they got rolled over to finecast.

Aye, I've never had an actual "fine"cast to date, every single one of them I have to send back for another pack. Not to mention when they're finally "fine"cast, the amount of cleaning up you have to do is just plain annoying, why couldn't they just use plastic sprue instead?

And that sternguard veteran picture is simply epic...

At my FLGS they had a Finecast Tyranid Lictor sitting on the shelf for a long time. I had seen a lot of stuff come and go but the lictor had stayed. I pick it up and look at it and holy bejebus! $45 for ONE LICTOR! I asked them what was up with it and they said that GW gave them a messed up price guide.

It is now $20 if it's still there....

So, only because he had performed admirably when quasi-proxied, I decided to get the deathleaper model, mostly because i love the multi-eyed head and the snazzy claws.
It took 3 and a half months before I finally cancelled the order, and two weeks after that the owner of my FLGS called me to let me know my order had come in. Appearantly his (former) GW rep was a moron, and had never place the actual order. As a "sorry" GW rush ordered the model (and the set of boneswords I had ordered along with it) gratis. The swords were fine, but the deathleaper was... uuh... "pitted and bubbled", and since I didn't want to have to wait until Christmas for them to send another pitted and bubbled model, I just set to repairing it. A full list of repairs (from memory) includes, but is not limited to:
-filling multiple large bubbles on each rending claw arm (the stubby ones)
-3 large bubbles in the tail
-realizing the mold had slipped on the left scything talon, leaving a nearly hollow arm, which i filled with GS and glued the halves together
- sculpting 4-5 of the spikes/spines on the legs and on top of the scything talon arms
- sculpting the veins/musculature in various places, as they had not cast properly

All said and done, the "free" model cost me roughly $8 USD in green stuff, $6 USD in gap filler compound, probably $0.5 in pins, plasticard, and $35 USD in a decent bottle of gin to keep me happy and not smashing the model with a sledgehammer.
Maybe if I can get a hold of a camera I'll post a picture of all the greenstuff covering the model. It's quite humorous. I still need to finish alot of the fine details in the sculpts, but I need to get better tools for that.

Though I will admit all of the hive/tyrant guard and zoeys I've gotten thus far have been stellar. Seems like they waited until the one model I was actually looking forward to getting to feth up spectacularly. That being said, I do plan on expanding my tyranids, and finding as many metal blisters of the models as I can find. Here's to them releasing some gakky looking doom of malan'tai which will similarly be a bubbled mess, have a spindly body and an enormous head... oh wait.. they'll never do that as they'd nearly be finished with releasing the tyranid line then, and we cant have that now can we

I took a look at games workshops financial reports you'll find these on the corporate website. I am not surprised that they have made an additional £15mil. We are paying more for in all honesty an inferior product and for the record they still have not got back to my official complaint. I'll keep you all posted.

I've had a lot of trouble with Finecast, but GW has actually been very helpful about it. I actually ended up with two Haemonculi because GW sent me a replacement one for the one I had, whom I was able to repair with some reconstructive surgery. (I replaced an entire arm that was missing most of the hand.)

I find that large models, such as my Bloodthirster, come out great. My worst thus far have been the likes of Striking Scorpions, with arms that looked like they were run over and just terrible quality. Overall I like Finecast as it is a light material that is easy to cut, file, assemble and glue, but I do hate how it bends sometimes after it's already painted and finished.

My theory is that they just keep mailing out the Failcasts that people return to them haha I decided awhile ago that I will not by any "Fine"cast for any reason. Modding all my special characters or buying old sculpts.

My wracks came out decent until I got to the liquifier gun. It is half missing and looks.... Liquified

I can't understand why their finecast line is so crap. It's supposed to be something luxurious, right? FINEcast. Not just that scrappy plastic but FINE!
That are all TERRIBLE!

The casts often have bubbles and the likes, and why? I've bought a great deal of resin models from other companies. Varying quality, especially when it comes to fragility. I've had one where touching anything on her was an inviation to it all falling off. but NONE OF THEM have had the kind of bubbles and miscast where the top half is misaligned with the bottom I see on every finecast. NONE!. The casting itself has always been flawless. Finecast, not so much.

Second, the models themselves have no details to be envied, atleast the finecasts I've bought. They were bad models to begin with, and the only thing you could see clearer in the finecast was all the lazy work behind them. The flaws stand out. It was good enough for metal because it hid a lot of the faults. It's not good enough for finecast, because it actually DOES show details better than metal. and some oddly shaped weapons can atleast be bent into proper shape on metal.

Why are GW failing this so monstrously? How can they possibly be so much worse than say Scibor? Every single model I have gotten from Scibor has been flawless and the resin has been great. "bigger production lines! More chances of flaws!" I hear some people say. Then why are the plastics fantastic? And if finecast is so much harder to get good and so impossible to quality check in bulk, then scrap it and plastic it.

It's f***ing ridiculous how poorly maintained this is by a company the size of GW.

Baronyu wrote:
why couldn't they just use plastic sprue instead?

I imagine they are still using the same molds they were using with the metal, and just wanted to go to a non-metallic (cheaper) medium. They had to come up with something that would flow into the metal molds. I doubt the injection molded plastics would work with the old metal molds.

This resin crap works, somewhat, sometimes, but it is such an awful material for miniatures. It doens't cure properly and seems to warp even under moderate heat, like leaving it on a window sill on a sunny day.

Kevlar wrote:

I imagine they are still using the same molds they were using with the metal, and just wanted to go to a non-metallic (cheaper) medium. They had to come up with something that would flow into the metal molds.

I have read multiple times that they actually had to make new molds for the "Fine"cast and that the molds are more expensive by pressing the models are cheaper. Granted, this might be a rumor that I am perpetuating.

 felixander wrote:

Kevlar wrote:

I imagine they are still using the same molds they were using with the metal, and just wanted to go to a non-metallic (cheaper) medium. They had to come up with something that would flow into the metal molds.

I have read multiple times that they actually had to make new molds for the "Fine"cast and that the molds are more expensive by pressing the models are cheaper. Granted, this might be a rumor that I am perpetuating.

You're kind of right. They needed to make new molds - this is evidenced by the sprue. They're still the same kind of molds the metals used, and I'm pretty sure they use the same machines. They're more expensive because the molds degrade faster than they did with metal.

What a lot of people don't realise is how much money it costs to tool a plastic injection mold. Its expensive. The upside is it's cheaper to produce the models, even cheaper than resin, the downside is it has a much higher up front cost. Thus only models they know will sell in high quantites get a plastic kit, and characters haven't because they simply don't sell enough.

However, they have been experimenting. Look at WHFB, with the plastic generic characters. Granted, these are generic, no special characters outside of Karl Franz, which is an anomaly due to him being on the Griffon sprue. These are characters that most people will have in their WHFB armies, in some cases multiples. They're also made 4 characters to a mold. Rumour is the limied edition chaplain was a test to see if people want these for 40k.

 evildrspock wrote:
I find that large models, such as my Bloodthirster, come out great. My worst thus far have been the likes of Striking Scorpions, with arms that looked like they were run over and just terrible quality. Overall I like Finecast as it is a light material that is easy to cut, file, assemble and glue, but I do hate how it bends sometimes after it's already painted and finished.

Scorpions are the only ones I've bought so far, they came out great.

I'll possibly be picking up some Fire Dragons before long. I'd much rather get older metal models, but I just feel bad buying off of Ebay now a days and then playing with the models at my store.

-Loki- wrote:However, they have been experimenting. Look at WHFB, with the plastic generic characters. Granted, these are generic, no special characters outside of Karl Franz, which is an anomaly due to him being on the Griffon sprue. These are characters that most people will have in their WHFB armies, in some cases multiples. They're also made 4 characters to a mold. Rumour is the limied edition chaplain was a test to see if people want these for 40k.

Yeah, and you can already see that a little bit in the world of 40k. Instead of making mass runs with miniatures that are the same, they're making smaller boxes with upgrade sprues. The switch from boxes of sluggas and boxes of shootas into small boxes of boyz with the bitz to make both is an example of them moving in this direction.

Likewise, you get enough junk with the guard command sprue that you could pretty easily convert like half the special characters from what they give you in bitz.

It would thus make sense that, in the future, you would get something more explicit. Like a "space marine special character" plastic box that gives you the bitz to turn a regular looking space marine into cato, or he'stan or pedro, etc. That way, they'd get enough volume (because most vanilla marine players include at least one special character) in the short term to make the investment pay off, while getting on the long-term cost-saving wagon earlier than later.

It's a good direction, honestly. Having put together a couple of the plastic WHFB characters (Necromancer and Tomb Banshee) I really want to see what they do for 40k.

My main hope is they keep them somewhat compatible with the ranges they're for. Like, a plastic Librarian with unique legs, torso, head and arms, but the join spots are all the same as the other plastics in the range. the WHFB stuff is great, but it's very unique for generic characters, there's not much room for conversions without extensive work.

Oh, I also forgot - guard vehicles. If you buy a leman russ, you get most of the bitz required to make all of the variants. I feel like it's only a matter of time before chimeras start automatically including the bitz to make a hellhound, and artillery coming with a chimera chassis, and then the bitz to make at least 3 of the guns.

That's definitely the direction they should be heading, if only because it reduces SKUs for indie stores, letting them technically stock more of the range on less shelf space. While it's understandable less shelf space isn't what GW wants, they DO want people buying their stuff, and the more people can find at an indie store, the more they'll buy.

It also increases the amount of bitz for sale on the internet. Of course, that's not what GW or indie stores want to hear.

The other problem is that it drives up the price of miniatures as you're forced to pay for stuff you're probably not going to use. An ork boy can only have two arms. Likely either the sluggas or shootas are going to be things you pay for but never use. For value-conscious hobbyists like myself, it is kind of a drain.

All of my Finecast experience has been aweful. Filling bubbles, resculpting spikes/edges, bent stuff, etc. as other have stated. I stick to plastic or second hand metal, no way I'm voting for finecast with my wallet. It is crap.

Haha i had this problem with orcs and goblins mangler squigs! They literally had no feet. And now when I glue them the slowly slowly bend out of shape. Hate fine cast. I even hate painting the damn things.

I don't like that I have to go through every blister and pick te best looking one. With metal I could jut grab one off the rack and not worry, but with the finecast you really have to stop and look. What I really don't understand is why they didn't fancy up the sculpts a bit. They had to buy new molds anyway, why not change them up at least a little? Give me reason to buy finecast for full price indstead of trolling the Internet for older metals for a better price!

 Ailaros wrote:
The other problem is that it drives up the price of miniatures as you're forced to pay for stuff you're probably not going to use. An ork boy can only have two arms. Likely either the sluggas or shootas are going to be things you pay for but never use. For value-conscious hobbyists like myself, it is kind of a drain.

Ironically, I haven't noticed bits count influencing GW's pricing. They use whatever algorithm in the stars they use to decide kit prices. Look at the Razorback - it's the same price as the Rhino, but has the Rhino spures plus the Razorback sprue.

GW are going to price their stuff however they want. When it gets a bit absurd, like one PAGK box building every type of PAGK and only having 5 models, yes, it gets pricey. But that kind of box isn't the norm yet.