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I was given a GW gift certificate for my birthday and decided to get a Tau Riptide suit as a painting project. When I assembled it I noticed the half & half clamshell design of most of the major pieces puts the join lines right in the most visible places. The intakes for the jetpack for instance have really obvious join lines, even on the GW official painted models, and are pretty much impossible to remove. This sort of thing seems to happen rather a lot with GW kits in general.
When I get kits from other manufacturers, e.g. Tamiya they often have the parts designed so as to hide the place where the two clamshell halves join in recesses or barely visible areas, or have clamshell parts that join corner to corner rather than in the middle of a flat surface (if that makes sense?) thus eliminating those horrible obvious join lines that needs filling.

Is the profusion of joins in obvious areas something to do with the plastic injection molding process GW uses being different to some other major manufacturers, or is it just lazy model design?

Mould line along cabling... MOST IRRITATING THING EVER.

 JohnnyHell wrote:
Mould line along cabling... MOST IRRITATING THING EVER.

Mold line along curved rivet lines could be worse (Valkyrie engines...). Unbelievable! and VERY hard to clean up.

T

Ive always thought this, its so annoying! The riptide was pretty bad but the eldar spiritseer was nasty, massive ass tab stuck right in the middile of the smooth faceplate. WHY?

Honestly, I would prefer having seams in prominent places, as it makes them easier to work on. If the parts mate cleanly there's no problem, but if they don't (and they frequently won't), then I have easy access when it comes time to putty and sand the seam smooth (a convex curve, with or without a medial ridge, is probably the easiest shape to file/sand and a flat butt joint is the easiest to putty). It's the mold lines placed in tight, awkward corners, in the dips and folds of cloth, and along textured areas like ribbed cabling that really kill me.

The seams and mold lines aren't a result of total idiocy/laziness - they generally make sense from a production point of view, even if they can be a pain for the end user. While I frequently wish they were placed differently, I can't ever seem to think of another way of placing them that would allow the model to fit on the same number of sprues, have the same maximum depth to the mold, etc. all of which, I imagine, affects the tooling cost/difficulty.

I honestly think the seam placement that you prefer on historical kits is as much a result of the actual vehicle's design (compare the shapes of a WWII tank to a 40k one - smoother/less layered armor, thinner hull, shallower curves to domed parts, when present) as it is careful and deliberate breakdown of the parts. Then again, many shapes simply can't be produced without prominent seams - ship hulls are frequently split in half at the keel, airplane fuselages require a vertical or horizontal split that results in a full-length seam on two sides of the completed part, etc. It can be a pain, but it's a sensible enough production measure.

Tamiiya = Making model kits since the 1960s
GW = Relative NOOBs

GW don't have good injection moulding technology because they have not invested a lot of money in it.

That may not be a problem considering they make toy soldiers rather than precision scale models like Tamiya.