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Hey Dakka, I've been in the hobby for quite some time now, but only recently have i decided to take it more seriously with assembly and painting, I want to remove the mold lines from my minatures, but i find that this takes an age as i spend a lot of time just building 1 model from removing them! I'm not the best painter (Although I am learning), but i feel like i have some sort of OCD towards removing them now as i feel i won't be taking the hobby seriously if i don't. But the time and patience is annoying me, I was just wondering, do you think it's essential to remove mold lines and are there any good tips for removing them (I currently use the blade from a hobby knife but it still takes some time)

Cheers

Yes it is important. They can ruin a good paintjob. Files or blades are the easiest way

To me?

It's important as it bothers me if I'm not turning out the best quality minis I can. But, while I play regularly, I do find painting and modelling the most satisfying part though.

If they don't bother you, then don't worry, they are invisible at tabletop level, no big deal.

If you have aspirations to be taken seriously as a painter, or have aspirations to enter competitions, take commissions or just to have a rep as a good painter in your local area, the I'm afraid you're just going to have to put in the time to clean them up.

Removing the mold lines, while being a paint, really is pretty essential, especially as your painting improves. Mold lines are very easily seen and can detract greatly from an otherwise nicely finished model. As far as removing the mold lines, I would suggest using fine files or emery boards. If you cannot find ones for model work, the emery boards that come from the cosmetics and nail care section of your local store can be extremely useful, especially since they come in a variety of grits ranging from fairly coarse to a fine polish which can be used to clean up clear parts.

A mold line is an unnatural gradient for ink washes to flow in terms of gravity. A viscous amount of paint will clutch to the line and create unintended shading. That being said, I enjoy round Iron files for my pewter models mold lines and a trusty hobby blade for my plastics, although they often warrant the iron files afterwards to reform the original contour of the mold.

I find that forgetting to remove even one mold line can ruin a model really quickly once i get to washing and shading as others have said.

a simple sharp exacto blade can clean off tons of lines really quickly.

Faux Pas wrote:
That being said, I enjoy round Iron files for my pewter models mold lines and a trusty hobby blade for my plastics, although they often warrant the iron files afterwards to reform the original contour of the mold.

This is exactly my technique as well. I use my model knife for 99% of removing mold lines.

I'd consider a visible mold like to be a serious detriment on a painted model and once I see one I missed, it's always the first thing I see when I next look at the model

Removing lines is not like painting which requires more concentration and a good area to work in.
You can clean up lines while watching tv for instance.A couple of containers and a knife is all you need.
Scrape the lines off and drop the cleaned part into a container then get your next part.
You can also take parts to be cleaned wherever you want, you're not limited to your room or wherever you do your modelling normally.

They're pretty annoying and should be removed, but if you're only going to play with your models then you don't have to bother. I usually leave them on mechanical parts when it comes to Orks, but anything else gets them scraped off. I tend to leave them on parts that people won't see, like inner arms or undersides of heads. It goes along with the "if nobody will see it, don't paint it" guideline, but if it's a showcase model/centerpiece then they should be removed.

Many a time I've got half way through painting to find a mold line i had missed and had to strip it , go back and start again. Dont consider it worth painting if theres nasty lines all over it as it cant possibly look nice no matter how good the paint job may or may not be.

I'm not going to lie, the initial part cleaning (removing bits of sprue left by the clippers and filing particularly nasty mold lines) is by far my most hated part of assembly. It always takes way too long, and I can never get the part looking exactly smooth anyway.

To me it just doesn't seem worth it unless the line is huge or in an extremely noticeable location.

I think its really important to be honest.

Why?

Because while a good paint job may take skill, removing mold lines for the most part just takes effort.

It will improve the quality of the appearance of your models.

I use the back side of my hobby knife, or sanding sticks.

best of luck, and enjoy your fruits of your new efforts!

They look really awful and kind of take me out of the paintjob. Imagine an epic scene, with soldiers charging up over the trenches and through barbed wire while bullets whiz over their heads. This squad of soldiers is pinned down, save for one bold hero who jumps into the gun pit and takes out the machine gun pinning his squad down. The camera pans up to show his face, and there's a big honking unseemly mold line running through it. A piece of flash is sticking off his rifle, keeping it from fitting flush with his hands. A bullet that would have missed him just catches the mold line sticking out of his shoulder pad, causing him to spin and fall on the ground, face first into a jutting piece of rebar that penetrates his neck, killing him.

Mrs. Hero receives a letter from the plastic general. It reads "Your husband was up for promotion after his action in the trenches, but was brutally caught in the mold line, causing a fumble that ended his life prematurely. Before your children go off to war, make sure their mold lines are properly trimmed. This is a tragedy we would not want to repeat.
Sincerely,
General Plastic"

So yeah trim your mold lines. It's distracting and takes you out of it. It takes seconds to do and improves the look of your model immensely, while making it look a lot less amateurish. Drilling out your gun barrels is a good thing to do also, or at least painting the muzzle where the bullets/bolter shells/what have you black.

I don't think it's that important.

If the surface is hidden, the mold lines can stay there. Nobody will see it and if it can't be seen, I don't care if it's there.

40k models are just 3d playing counters, anyway.

I also don't have any form of gamer OCD. That path leads to rivetcounting and "that paint-scheme is innacurate for the blah-blah-blah".

Drill the gun barrels too.

It gets a lot faster with practice. Soon you'll be scraping them so fast you will wonder why you ever considered not scraping them and how you could be annoyed with such a minor task.

An interesting thing to note is that Forge World has a lot less mold lines, at least for the power armored marines. But when there is a mold line, or even worse, a slipped mold or some other miscast, it takes a lot more effort to correct.

I think removing mold lines also depends on the type of model you are painting. The newest ones released by GW (dark vengance comes to mind) are actually really slick in hiding mold lines with armor plates and joints. The new wraithguard models have very few mold lines, but a lot of lines where joints connect (like on their shoulders). This requires green stuff instead of shaving.
Most space marine models have easily removable mold lines, as do most ork models.

I hate mold lines myself.
I use: knife, emery board (the type women use to do their nails), files & the GW scraper tool.
Good tip if, when using a knife, you get anoying little furry bits of plastic clinging onto the model, use liquid poly cement to melt them away - make sure the glue brush has hardly any glue on though.

Im in the boat that hate mold lines, I think I spend about as long cleaning and building models as I do painting them.

Iv always been a fan the humble hobby knife, nice sharp one will get the lines of pretty well. Metal models are when Id use files.

I've heard this is very good for removing mold lines.

Any exacto knife or file will do.

 gianlucafiorentini123 wrote:
I've heard this is very good for removing mold lines.

Oh yes, the classic "We feth up our models, now pay us more money and you can fix them yourself"

My philosophy is that it's better to cut/file away too much than too little. The times I've looked at an unpainted model and gone "Eh, that mold line is so thin, it's not gonna show" and then I paint it up and the mold line shows. Clearly.

For plastics I use an X-Acto kind of knife, dirt cheap from hardware stores. And for metal I use little files, also really cheap from hardware stores. There is no reason what so ever buying those tools from Games Workshop or GF9.

Wow, a lot more people hate removing mold lines than I expected.

For me, I don't mind at all. It's kinda... zen-like when I'm doing them. I listen to music and enter the zone.

Basically - unless you don't mind crappy looking models you've got to clean those lines. That said, cleaning-flash/mold-lines is by far the most hated aspect of this hobby for me... I would pay good money to have all my flash cleaned.

 chromedog wrote:
I don't think it's that important.

If the surface is hidden, the mold lines can stay there. Nobody will see it and if it can't be seen, I don't care if it's there.

40k models are just 3d playing counters, anyway.

I also don't have any form of gamer OCD. That path leads to rivetcounting and "that paint-scheme is innacurate for the blah-blah-blah".

Calling models something like "3d playing counters" is really dismissive. If it was a board game and the toys in it had mold lines, I wouldn't really care. I'm going to be spending hours painting these models though, and I want them to look good for my time and effort. Then again, I definitely have some kind of gamer OCD, since I can't even bring myself to ally forces together that don't have a unified basing scheme, so I guess that's where you and I differ.

 Brother SRM wrote:

 chromedog wrote:
I don't think it's that important.

If the surface is hidden, the mold lines can stay there. Nobody will see it and if it can't be seen, I don't care if it's there.

40k models are just 3d playing counters, anyway.

I also don't have any form of gamer OCD. That path leads to rivetcounting and "that paint-scheme is innacurate for the blah-blah-blah".

Calling models something like "3d playing counters" is really dismissive. If it was a board game and the toys in it had mold lines, I wouldn't really care. I'm going to be spending hours painting these models though, and I want them to look good for my time and effort. Then again, I definitely have some kind of gamer OCD, since I can't even bring myself to ally forces together that don't have a unified basing scheme, so I guess that's where you and I differ.

One of the many reasons I don't base models.

It's also irritating to see soldiers carrying patches of grass through a destroyed cityscape or rubble through a forest.

Frankly unless they're really big, i just leave them. I like having a painted army on the table but a few mold lines i don't mind as unless people are picking up the models and inspecting them then no one notices. Now if i were doing a model specifically for show casing then yes but just for gaming then no.

Except on my MC's i do try to get most of them

An interesting post to come across, now that I've begun working on the massive heap of Reaper Bones from their recent kickstarter. I consider myself an experienced painter, but a fast one: I use drybrushing and inks/washes, and never use blending. I'll spend extra time on heroes and special figures, but the troopers get colors blocked in, and the ol' army dip. And the mold lines on those Reaper bones guys are among the worst I've seen - so bad that I can't leave 'em as is.

Although the quality of the bones minis is worse that I was expecting, I'm not that disappointed, as the cost-per-mini was ultimately less than $0.50, given their wild success. But I was expecting an easy paint up: and the mold lines are too prominent to leave alone. And additionally: removing flash from the bones-material is a pain! It's rubbery, so files won't work well, and even holding the hobby blade perpendicular to the model's surface (easy-peasy with plastic minis) takes quite a bit of scraping to clean up.

So to answer the OP's subject line: removing prominent mold lines is important to me.

Thanks for all of the comments guys, i do agree the mold lines can easily be spotted and they do have an impact on the paintjob. I've only done the removal on a few units, and what i've done does feel satisyfing even without a paintjob (I was going to get round to painting soon)

I currently use an X-Acto knife and use the basic removal methods found on websites, i guess that I am just getting used to it.

I am planning on doing a squad of FWs tomorrow, if you're interested I will tell you how I get on.

Cheers

 Brother SRM wrote:
They look really awful and kind of take me out of the paintjob. Imagine an epic scene, with soldiers charging up over the trenches and through barbed wire while bullets whiz over their heads. This squad of soldiers is pinned down, save for one bold hero who jumps into the gun pit and takes out the machine gun pinning his squad down. The camera pans up to show his face, and there's a big honking unseemly mold line running through it. A piece of flash is sticking off his rifle, keeping it from fitting flush with his hands. A bullet that would have missed him just catches the mold line sticking out of his shoulder pad, causing him to spin and fall on the ground, face first into a jutting piece of rebar that penetrates his neck, killing him.

Mrs. Hero receives a letter from the plastic general. It reads "Your husband was up for promotion after his action in the trenches, but was brutally caught in the mold line, causing a fumble that ended his life prematurely. Before your children go off to war, make sure their mold lines are properly trimmed. This is a tragedy we would not want to repeat.
Sincerely,
General Plastic"

So yeah trim your mold lines. It's distracting and takes you out of it. It takes seconds to do and improves the look of your model immensely, while making it look a lot less amateurish. Drilling out your gun barrels is a good thing to do also, or at least painting the muzzle where the bullets/bolter shells/what have you black.

So basically removing mold lines saves lives. Seems legit.

Personally mold lines are the worst thing ever and it takes time, but worth it in the end.