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who misses the metal minis of the old days and is there still a company that exclusively makes metal minis, and why did metal die out :( I loved metal, I still have my metal gunslinger cypher :/

bitethythumb wrote:
who misses the metal minis of the old days and is there still a company that exclusively makes metal minis, and why did metal die out :( I loved metal, I still have my metal gunslinger cypher :/

First, metal minis have absolutely not died out.

There are plenty of companies that sell entirely, or almost entirely, metal miniatures.

Red Box Games
Zombiesmith Studios
Hasslefree Miniatures
O2Games
Lead Adventure
Onslaught Miniatures
Artizan Designs
Corvus Belli
Great Escape Games
Eureka Miniatures
Harwood Hobbies
Otherworld Miniatures
Wargames Foundry
Khurasan Miniatures
GHQ Models
Reaper Miniatures

Okay, I'm getting sick of listing them. Point is, lots and lots and lots and lots of companies still predominantly produce table top wargaming models in spincast pewter.

Second, the reason is incredibly straightforward:

Spincast pewter is still one of the cheapest ways to mass-produce miniatures in terms of setup costs. Molds are inexpensive, and the production process is much less labor intensive than resin casting. Spincast pewter remains, and likely will remain, one of the best options for small companies producing table top wargaming miniatures.

Some small companies ONLY put out metals. Lots of companies have lines in various materials. For example, Reaper has their metal Dark Heaven, Pathfinder, etc, but ALSO puts out PVC models in their bones lines. So if it bothers you if they put out ANYTHING in another material, your options are more limited. Most of the ones listed above in the previous post have put out something in an alternate material, even if most of what they put out is metal.

Metal declined in use in part because China controls the tin market, or at least did for a while. They made the price fluctuate, so it made pricing models harder when you didnt know what you were going to pay for raw materials 6 months later.

In general, larger companies use whatever material suits the model best. Some sculpts simply aren't feasible in metal due to the weight. I noticed you saw Darklands was converting some of their line to metal. However they really cant convert all of it. Krull is a huge model and costs almost $200 in resin, and is I think about 6-7 inches tall, with pretty massive wings

http://mierce-miniatures.com/index.php?act=pro&pre=mrm_dkl_inf_dis_wld_101_000

He'd probably weigh about 6 pounds in metal, and the cost would go up even more. Resin seems more expensive for smaller, man sized units because you have to babysit the casting process. So more labor intensive, but less costly in materials. As the model size increases, the price of materials exceeds the additional labor cost, so large metal gets expensive fast. I would guess Krull would cost $300 or more in metal.

However you also have sculpts which aren't feasible in metal. Wyrd for example, has lots of smaller parts. With plastic cement, you can weld them together. However the bits are too small to pin, so a metal version of the same sculpt would be very fragile.

Different materials, different strengths and weaknesses.

Metal has an expensive material cost, but a very low tooling cost.

Plastic has a very low material cost, but a very high tooling cost.

Restic... kind of halfway on tooling costs, but has other problems. (I like restic - but it can be a pain in the nethers to clean the mold lines off.)

Even different resins have different properties.

And then there was Finecast....

The Auld Grump

 TheAuldGrump wrote:


Restic... kind of halfway on tooling costs, but has other problems. (I like restic - but it can be a pain in the nethers to clean the mold lines off.)

I too quite like the material itself, but PP's policy of casting it in what was essentially open moulds and selling the result for hardly less [or even more] than their excellent metal veriosn kind of killed Restic for me.