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I just bought a bunch of old space marines. I also have some of the brand new marines. These are all the muti-part kits. The pieces on the new sprues and the pieces on the old sprues were absolutely identical. While assembling them I noticed a couple of differences. The old ones were a lighter color grey plastic. The mold lines on these were so negligible that it almost wasn't worth the time to clean them. The new ones were a darker plastic. The mold lines were much more noticeable and there was also a lot of flash that had to be removed. The only thing that I could think of was that GW had to save money by switching to a cheaper and lower quality plastic/molding process. Meanwhile, they're constantly increasing their prices which just doesn't make sense to me unless they honestly and truly just don't give a crap about their customers. All the while they're moving away from metals wherever they can and they're trying to justify how much better plastics are as they make almost all of their kits out of it. Has anyone else noticed this? I'm not a fan of metals. They're a pain to convert. Dropping metals to switch to plastics is perfectly acceptable to me. On the other hand, I'm not a fan of them lowering the quality of their plastics as they increase their prices exponentially. If you're going to constantly increase your prices then maybe you should consider increasing the quality of your models. The quality was there in the past but now it seems to be slipping for no apparent reason. They're putting fewer and fewer models in their boxed sets. They're using lower quality plastics that requires us to do more work to make sure that the finished product doesn't look like crap. Meanwhile, they're charging more and more.

There's a lot more detail in newer minis, and they look much better as well to me. Look at the old Space Marines; yes, they're adowable and cartoony, but the new ones look much more serious. They don't have the goofy, stumpy legs, for instance and even the new beaky helmets look more GRIMDARK.

Dude...The old sprues are identical to the new sprues. The only difference is that the new sprues are slightly darker and they have a lot more flash and much thicker mold lines.

Oh, you're talking about the old sprues, not the old-old RT era sprues. D'oh.

I haven't noticed it. The mold lines are more prominent, but I think that's because the plastic's harder. I've noticed that my new 'hard grey' Space Marines don't break much compared to my old 'soft white' Chaos Marines, which break and bend quite a lot.

Maybe. The way that they're built, though, it seems like they'd be solid enough to weather any normal wear and tear.

I don't like the mold lines on the new models, but I do think it is because they are probably working on better molding technology. If you look at the quality of the models they have most definitely improved drastically in many ways, and I would have a hard time calling the price rises literally exponential.

You get bad sets and you get good sets, the outcome is pretty consistent with what I have seen. Some armies have it worse than others, and some minis have obviously been defective and sold anyway because of blablablablabla on a nice Reuben sandwich with a bag of chips and a soda please.

Honestly I've only seen the opposite. New models have less mould lines and less flash. And the darker harder plastic is better as well.

The parts on the new sprues are identical to what came on the older sprues. They've just been reorganized. Admittedly, I only play Orks and space marines but I've noticed the same phenomena with both of them. When I put together old, light grey orks the mold lines are almost non existent. The same goes for marines. Old, light grey sprues don't require any mold line cleanup. The new, dark grey sprues are horrible and the flash is so bad that you have to spend a lot of extra time removing it. When I assemble models from the old sprues I don't even bother with the mold lines. By the time I'm done painting them the mold lines are non existent. Try to do it with the newer models and the mold lines are blatantly obvious.

The newer models are far better than the old ones , Iam talking about when they re-sculpt a unit it usually is far cooler and more detailed . The plastic is also a better plastic and the molds make for a tighter more detailed figure ( again this is seen with new sculpts with more detail ) . GW is way over priced we all know this and they really dont care about the consumer since they never run a sale or give good deals they used too back in the day though .

But GW has the best line of plastics out there and have the most consistant sculpts to match , there plastics have as much detail as pewter does . I know when I look at other ranges you have to get through alot of crap befor you get a really nice figure , with GW its the other way around .

Iam no GW fanboy i hate the way they run there company like raising the price for online companys to buy there product so we have a harder time getting better deals . But they do know how to make a mini and they get better at it not worse .

Mold lines are a by product of injection molding plastics. Two halves of the mold fit together, and thats where the lines form. If the halves arent aligned properly we get those lovely lines.

Theoretically there are quality control people that toss badly aligned casts back into the scrap line to get remelted. But, more often than not I think that guy is out kissing Jervis's butt and tellin him how wonderful he is

The reason quality is slipping?

You are still buying it no matter how bad it is molded, no matter how expensive.

Stop buying a bit, or start complaining outside of a forum.

I had this with some Orks I bought. The plastic is darker, the mold lines are a little thicker, but the detail is leaps and bounds ahead. You probably can't notice on smoother models like Space Marines, but they really upped the ante in plastic detailing. The IG command boxes, for example, are gorgeous, as is the Nob box.

I can deal with slightly more annoying mold lines if it means nicer looking product in the end. Harder plastic is nice too.

Don't really know much about injection moulding, but I suspect the more detail on a Die, the greater the pressure needed to make sure the molten plastic (assume it's molten!) gets into all the nooks and crannies. This then means it's also reasonable to assume the greater pressure causes more squidging out the sides, and thus more flash and mould lines.

Seriously not had a major problem with a GW plastic kit for some time now.

Occassionally find that the mould lines are quite pronounced where the alignment between the two sides of the mould was out, but mostly I have no complaints with GW plastics...

...except for the price

I found it sad that when I opened a pack of Assault Marines, I found the regular backpacks for marines had holes in the back, where the rounded divet is to place them on the marine's back. I didn't need them, but I was saddened. :(

Lorgar's_Blessed wrote:I found it sad that when I opened a pack of Assault Marines, I found the regular backpacks for marines had holes in the back, where the rounded divet is to place them on the marine's back. I didn't need them, but I was saddened. :(

That hole's always been there, hasn't it?

Mattlov wrote:The reason quality is slipping?

You are still buying it no matter how bad it is molded, no matter how expensive.

Stop buying a bit, or start complaining outside of a forum.

True, but can you imagine this guy NOT talking to people about this? Just because forums can be a bit rowdy has absolutely no effect on how much information you can share, how many people will listen, and how generally easy it is. This is the internets, I am here listening, and so are the rest of the people that have read and responded to this thread.

If GW does not listen to it's customer base, they will/do begin to A.) stop buying products or B.) buy the cheapest or most second-hand products that they find. No amount of economical theory is going to change the fact that if we all buy used GW goes out of business, I love being rational .

Don't knock the guy for trying geez though, I appreciate that he is here sharing his information with us, because I have seen and experienced some of the same things. This is probably one of the best ways to complain, so be nice, and share the air my friend.

Increasing mould lines and flash is a sign of the moulds getting a bit old and tired. It's expensive to recut a mould which is why they won't bother. That's why the old Rhino looked a real dog in later years.

There are other things, if you get lumpy looking miscasts, or that unpleasant snaking pattern of creases in the plastic (you see it on really cheap toys quite often) that's a sign the plastic wasn't hot ehough when going into the mould. Instead of flowing in as a liquid it has started to solidify meaning it doesn't fill the mould and forms folds which cause the above effects. Sink marks, on the other hand, are a sign that the plastic has been whipped out the mould before it has cooled enough to harden fully.

I don't know what people have observed in general, but if any of these have increased it's mainly a sign that the manufacturer is rushing they stuff in and out of the moulds witha back seat given to quality.

My landing pad, new chaos termis, and new CSM are on harder darker plastics and with very very small mouldlines, so I dont see quality going down, by the contrary... Not so long the clearer plastics would crack very easy.

I have to disagree, I bought some Gretchin recently and I almost didn't have to remove the mold lines, they were so negligable.

I also have to say I have never had an issue with GW quality.

I note that allot of the posters complaining of quality issues have origininated in the US, do you think it is an issue with the Memphis production runs rather than a general GW problem? I understand that the Uk facility has been re-tooled, prehaps the US has not been done yet?

If it hadn't been for some folks agreeing with this dude I would have thought this was a troll thread. I've had no problems, although I have a passion for not having mold lines on my models. I've rarely seen any plastic model that didn't need some scraping or filing in that regard, so pretty well all of them get the treatment. Most of the possible explanations I have seen here make sense, although I know squat about casting on that level.

I've had very few quality issues with GW product over the years; most of those were pretty obvious QC blow-bys.

I gotta agree with those posters who haven't had a problem. As much as prices have been rising I can't fault the quality of GW minis. Their plastics are brilliant and the level of detail is far better then the old models. I have a lot of the old 40K 2nd Ed Marines and if you compare them to the newer models you can see the difference in quality and detail. One of the things that bugged me about the old Marines is how the eye lenses in the helmet would sometimes be different sizes.

I do have one problem with GW plastics though. It seems that if I drop them from table height onto a concrete floor they bounce, but remain intact. Yet when I drop them onto a soft floor like carpet from roughly 2-3 inches they virtually explode!

I've noticed this too, with both Marine and Ork sprues. The older pieces, moulded in light grey plastic, are definitely crisper and cleaner than new versions of the same pieces. It's particularly noticable on the redesigned Marine and Ork sprues - especially the heads, guns and smaller details like pouches. It looks as though they may have cast the new versions from the originals, as casting tends to result in this kind of loss of detail. Some of the initial all-new Ork models were noticably rough - especially the Loota/Burna components (but not the Mek components, which are much cleaner). I wondered if it was just sub-standard finish on the original scuplts. On the other hand, the quality of the finish on very recent sprues, like the Nobz, is as good as the older models.

In the case of vehicles, the level of precision and detail has become much better. If you look closely at the Land Raider, which was designed before they started using computer scans, you can see quite a few flaws (some of them a result of not having cleaned up the prototype components before making the moulds). But recent vehicles like the Battlewagon are generally much better engineered (even if aspects of the design are questionable). Still not Tamiya quality, but edging closer.

It would actually be nice to compose a list of the flaws that people have seen consistently in the models.

I have not seen enough to make a solid conclusion about some of the errors that I have noticed.

People could just mention a specific problem they have had, especially if you sell them a lot and see a lot because of it. My friend had a librarian with something defective in the armpit I think, I can't remember the specifics though.

This might be off topic, but when I first saw the discussion title, I was ready to go on a rant about how redshirts have declined in quality/knowledge and their willingness to help out in regards to the hobby.

i.e. asking about painting beards, and the "helpful" redshirt pointed to a chart on the wall. He then went on to try and sell me all the paints on said chart.

But, back on topic, models have gotten pretty amazing in quality in terms of detail (the new plastic kits are light years ahead of the ones released when I first started).

Wrexasaur wrote:It would actually be nice to compose a list of the flaws that people have seen consistently in the models.

I have not seen enough to make a solid conclusion about some of the errors that I have noticed.

People could just mention a specific problem they have had, especially if you sell them a lot and see a lot because of it. My friend had a librarian with something defective in the armpit I think, I can't remember the specifics though.

One of the Savage Orc models seem to have a recurring flaw. If memory serves it's the one with the Bonepick raised above it's head. One of feet looks like a massive lump of flash. Thankfully it's not as bad as it looks but still pretty annoying! But bareing in mind that the models in question aren't sold all that often and moulds for Metal Moulds wear out, it's possible the run I had simply coincided with the expiration of the mould. I dunno.

I take it you didn't buy any GW plastics from 2E / WFB5?

*those* were misaligned.

@john - hahaha.... yeah




GW quality has gone better. IMO.

Dont need to really say much. can see from most of hte new kits. They wouldn' have been able to do this.. in the past. =p

I'll bet they've been having some of it fabricated in China.. NUF said..