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Reaper's Bones line started with taking metal minis and releasing them in a new PVC material. Given GW's massive catalog of metal minis and that they've been willing to dip into that well and re-release some of them with their Made-to-Order offer, would there be a market if they made a similar step and re-released some long out of production miniatures in a PVC material?

I've recently been painting some oldhammer trolls and love the minis, but feel like it's a shame that such quality figures are no longer available. There are a lot of older GW figures that I'd love to have, but searching for some of them in good condition on Ebay isn't always easy.

While, yes, part of the appeal of Bones is how inexpensive they are, I would hope GW wouldn't charge metal prices if they ever took this route.

Juan Diaz daemonettes? Shut up and take all of my gaming funds.

Nope. Dislike PVC and love metal. Wouldn't be worth the quality loss. I like PVC for board games but would not buy (any more) PVC wargaming miniatures.

PVC... No thanks. The few models I bought (Did not know beforehand they were PVC) were atrocious and floppy. Such a waste of money.

Hate PVC. Never got on with the material personally.

Ill take Teutogen guard anyway i can!

It depends. Some old models were brilliant. Others were truly awful.

So, if I liked the model AND the cast was good AND the material was better than some I've seen AND the price was right, then might be interested, yes.

I have a suspicion that not all of the above would be likely to come into conjunction.

Classic Warhammer models made from PVC, heavens no!

I have 1 Reaper Bones Troll and that is enough PVC for me.

On the other hand I do have a Reaper CAV army and that is also made of the Bones material, and while I dislike the material greatly I would not want these models in metal or resin.

PVC?

Like those in the FFG dungeoneering game?

You might as well ask if I'd prefer a Herbal Tea.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
PVC?

Like those in the FFG dungeoneering game?

You might as well ask if I'd prefer a Herbal Tea.

Careful son, you're treading a fine line there...

I was apparently one of the few customers who liked Finecast, excepting the ridiculous prices. I would love to see the old metals in Bones or Mantic's new plastic, although price would probably still be an issue. For Bones prices, or even 2.5x Bones prices, I'd pick up all sorts of old character sculpts from GW. $30 for one PVC hero is a no-go, though.

I definitely got the wrong impression from the title of this thread. I half expected a picture of a life-sized spurecron.

Seriously now, I'd rather stick with metal models over the stuff Reaper Bones minis. I have 2-3 and I can confirm that metal > PVC.

I guess it would mainly work with chunky models, so some of the fantasy monsters would probably work out as would some of the older Chaos Warriors.

The Ogres were great:


Empire Reiksguard:


Trolls:


Chaos Warriors:

No for most stuff as the older reaper human sized minis didn't transfer to pvc well (and since bones is so soft it's probably the best you could expect, I suspect harder PVC would have been worse)

they just weren't designed with the material in mind and a lot of the detail was too shallow and vanished with the shrinkage you get as part of the process

Larger stuff might be OK though like ogres, trolls etc

Bones style PVC? Hell no.

PP style PVC? Depends on the model.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
You might as well ask if I'd prefer a Herbal Tea.

Elegantly put.

From GW? Plastic or GTFO.

We don't need Finecast 2.0.

Now, if they would ever redo the Eldar Aspects in plastic, I'd be all over that.

GW already tried this and it blew up in their faces.

It wouldn't be of much worth to me personally as I strongly dislike lots of the very old designs (e.g. I don't really understand why so many people are fussed about the mail order of the old Metall BB players).

I prefer the new aesthetics and multipart plastics...

Maybe not PVC, but metal or resin for the old marauder dwarfs I'd buy in a heartbeat.

Manchu wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
You might as well ask if I'd prefer a Herbal Tea.

Elegantly put.

?

Grot 6 wrote:GW already tried this and it blew up in their faces.

No, they tried Finecast, which is a completely different process/material than Reaper uses for Bones, and it yielded a product that cost as much if not more than metal minis. The goal of having PVC would be a lower cost, which given that we're talking about GW is probably a moot point.

Nope. I'm not interested in low-quality materials. I'd be willing to pay a higher price to get them in resin (real resin, not that finecast trash) if there was something I wanted, but most of the old stuff is really dated and not appealing to me. I wasn't playing back then, and those models just aren't very good if you don't have the nostalgia factor.

A very interesting idea.

I'd be very interested if they were priced like Reaper bones. Alot of the old GW designs are less greebly and not quite as "sharp" in their scuplting (not a bad thing if you like that style). They would probably lend themselves rather well to PVC. Further, I'd be mostly building up my oldhammer-chaos Kings of War army, so figs that aren't as crisp as plastic and metal would be even more acceptable in a masssed army situation. Additionally, it'd be much faster to build a unit of one-piece (or few-piece) minis and some of the old GW lines (like Chaos warriors, orcs, etc) are so vast that you could build pretty diverse units without having too much repitition.

I'd probably want to see them sold in blisters though as (ast least with bones) the quality can vary a bit and you don't want to buy something miscast.

 Eilif wrote:
Alot of the old GW designs are less greebly and not quite as "sharp" in their scuplting (not a bad thing if you like that style). They would probably lend themselves rather well to PVC.

Exactly the heroic/chunky style of GW's old minis would probably translate well to a Bones style material.

Plastic, metal, or resin - absolutely
PVC - absolutely not

Uh, what kind of PVC?

If it's the high quality PVC like The Walking Dead or DOOM then, absolutely, if it's like a buck or two per figure. They have fantastic detail and are sturdy.

If it's like Mantic or PP "restic" or Bones then no way.

The problem is that there's about a million different shades of PVC.

If they were to offer a plastic-y option of their metal models, why wouldn't they simple offer their normal GW plastic?

I guess I'm not sure why PVC is even a question when their normal plastic is available.

 Kap'n Krump wrote:
If they were to offer a plastic-y option of their metal models, why wouldn't they simple offer their normal GW plastic?

I guess I'm not sure why PVC is even a question when their normal plastic is available.

The premise of the question is akin to what Reaper did with their Bones product line. They had an existing range of metal miniatures that they were able to make in a PVC style plastic. Games Workshop has an extensive back catalog of metal miniatures that they are sitting on. Recently they have shown a much more friendly stance towards their older ranges/games, even going so far as to occasionally re-release some of their metal miniatures via their Made-to-Order program on their website.

They cannot manufacture their old range of metal miniatures using "normal GW plastic" because it is only able to be used in injection molding where there are no undercuts. Metal miniatures are made by removing a hard miniature from a flexible mold, PVC miniatures are made by removing a flexible miniature from a hard mold.

I see slatwalls filled with blisters of Reaper's Bones and now WizKids' Nolzur’s Marvelous Miniatures and I fondly think back to when my local store was filled with 25 feet of slatwall devoted to GW miniatures in blisters. That will never happen again, but given the quality of many of GW's metal offerings and the option of PVC, it would be cool to see some of those figures available again.

Are those Nolzur's minis out for sale yet? How come there wasn't a thread about them.

Yeah, my FLGS has them in stock and so do online retailers.