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Hi, I was just curious for the Kickstarter for the Mechadrome, what material are you planning to use to manufacture your minatures? Are you using plastic, resin or some other material?

The reason was I originally wanted to do a tabletop game myself but the price for injection molding is just way too high for enough minatures to be interesting. Like here is my own Kickstarter project with just two units. http://kck.st/1gjcklb

While my own units are bigger than a standard minature infantry/mini mech piece, the steel injection mold for plastic alone is really high ($18k+, even a small tiny unit is like $3000-$5000+ alone for the mold). I'm not that knowledgeable about making metal minatures, but I assume its more expensive to manufacture.

But I have seen other Kickstarter tabletop projects with minatures of lower cost, so do they do 3d printing or resin? I know resin is more expensive per unit but at least you don't need to make the steel mold.

If anyone knows anything about a better alternative, I would really like to know in the future if anyone has an answer. :/

Metal and resin minis are going to be the cheapest to make, because they use rubber molds.

Plastics and Restic (like what mantic uses) use metal molds which have to be machined.

Hard plastic may be the cheapest per unit, but you have to remember the huge investment in the mold. It is a huge number before it is cheaper per unit.

If you are making a few hundred models lets say, you pretty much have to use metal or resin to keep the price reasonable.

Your mechs look pretty cool .. but, yeah, I'm pretty much doing all metal and traditional resin for the bigger heavy mechs. Most of mine are going to be about the same size as a 30mm figure. Injection plastic is just way too expensive at this point for a brand new game.. after it's been out a while if it has the audience to support 1000's of copies then plastic will be a better option.

For you I think due to their size metal wouldn't be a good idea, so you should probably go with resin.. Or maybe the spin cast resin kind of like what Troll Forged does?

Ah okay... yeah for minifigs at lower quantities resin is probably the best option. Do you use pewter if you go the metal route?

 Nymbryxion wrote:
Ah okay... yeah for minifigs at lower quantities resin is probably the best option. Do you use pewter if you go the metal route?

'White Metal', its a tin based mix.

Yep, it's white metal .. we use Iron Wind Metals for our figures. They can do resin too, but they outsource it. But there's a lot of companies out there that do resin casting, just google it

You might be able to get away with a mix.. maybe metal for some smaller weapons, resin for the big pieces?