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I was thinking today about the future of wfb and how everybody seems to think that gw would not ditch recent kits due to the amount it has cost them to create them, £30k is often thrown around as the production and design cost.

Now back in the day when I worked for gw we had a tour of the studio and production floor, we got to see a machine literally pumping out necron warrior sprues every second. Now my thought is since gw have everything in house now, does it really cost them the huge ammounts of money people often quote to produce plastic kits?

The limited edition character sprues recently could be taken as an example of something which would cost any start up company vast resources to create and would be an investment that would not pay off possibly for years, where as for gw they are just a seemingly splash release.

Therefore if the production cost is low for gw, could splash releases of figures be a real possiblity and would they really be out of profit if they dropped a kit after only a year?

You can break the kit production GW is doing now down into several sections

Design Ideas (new ghosts for fantasy, a new marine kit for 40K?)

Concept art (now they know they want a Xmas sled for the space wolves what will it look like

this runs into

3D design & sculpting (actually design the kit)

this runs into

Parting out (3D model is broken up to best fit on the sprue with the appropriate number of parts and hide the mould lines etc, often overlooked this is just as important as the sculpting and can easily ruin an otherwise excellent mini)

Tooling (a metal mould is milled for your kit, run some test casts, more milling to refine the flow of the plastic repeat until it works).
The most expensive step, machine shops that 'get' miniatures are in short supply, everything is always overbooked. What costs here is time, the more actual milling time you take the more expensive it gets (some places will make an educated guess, add a bit and charge a flat fee, others will charge actual time)

production (once a mould is finished put it in a machine and kits come out)
Raw materials are cheap (but not as cheap as some people think), but the machines are expensive, reaper bought a small one, basic (but good quality on) it cost $500K. GW will have many machines and needs to maintain them, replace them as they get outdated etc

packaging (it's no good just making sprues, they need flashy boxes which is I think one thing GW does not do in house)



As a company that does all of the above in house GW can do it a lot cheaper than anybody who has to use independent contractors, for an individual kit, tooling themselves will save a bit, but more importantly they will always be able to do stuff when they want to

(but on the other hand they have to pay all their staff all the time even when they're not actually needed rather than just handing a fixed amount to a contractor)

so yes they could do limited release kits and make money, the question is how much doing so would leave on the table ?
what % of sales of a kit are in the first year?

If it's high enough it may well be that the added costs of keeping a mini available (either as a distributed mini or as a direct mini) would be outweigh the potential profits left behind

The colossal investment required for plastic wargame figure production is reflected in the fact that all the small companies doing 28mm historical figures now, are punching out brand new designs for 30 pence each, compared to over £1 for the very cheapest, oldest most limited GW sets like snapfit Tyranid Termagants.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
The colossal investment required for plastic wargame figure production is reflected in the fact that all the small companies doing 28mm historical figures now, are punching out brand new designs for 30 pence each, compared to over £1 for the very cheapest, oldest most limited GW sets like snapfit Tyranid Termagants.

Is that sarcasm?
I think that is sarcasm....
I am almost positive it's sarcasm.
Does anybody know if it is sarcasm?
It might be sarcasm...
Or it might be sarcasm....
On the other hand it could be sarcasm.



Sarcasm....

Damned i was reading a blog a while ago about a guy who has a small company making plastic inserts and slotta basses and even figures, he could estimate the costs forgot the name :(

Luckily for them, you can change the molds fairly easily. One machine can have any number of different molds. Even an outdated machine can pump out models literally 24 hours a day, 7 days a week needing only to stop for mold changes and color changes. The machines they have have paid for themselves years ag so the only cost on that end is new molds and raw plastic to put in. Without having to pay for the machines any longer, they are able to put funds that other newer companies would have to put towards them into paying for the new molds. Thus a new mold is "paid off" within months of being put into use. This allows them to stockpile cash for future new machines and pay for them outright from this fund without ever touching the "working cash flow".
For the splash releases, they are able to put multiple figures into the same mold so that they can get all of the models into a single mol and they will all drop at once. They dont need a seperate mold for each different one. So yes, they can make money off the splash releases as well, just takes them little bit longer but even so, it doesnt take long.
On the raw materials, nothing goes to waste. clipping, spare sprues, even trimmed flash is recycled. recycled plastic is cheaper than "new plastic" and still gets used.

There is also the material the mold is made from. For high print run sprues, you need a sturdier metal than for limited run sprues. This allows GW to cut costs a bit on the low run kits.

 Breotan wrote:
There is also the material the mold is made from. For high print run sprues, you need a sturdier metal than for limited run sprues. This allows GW to cut costs a bit on the low run kits.

Just to add to what you're saying. There are a good variety of alloys that can be used for the mold. The cheapest molds can be made of aluminum and can be good for up to no more than 10,000 parts if the parts removal isn't rough. With the generally soft plastic GW uses and their part complexity you might get 3000-4000 from the cheapest molds. These types of molds are usually used for prototype runs, to temporarily ramp up production, or as stop gaps while steel molds which take longer are finished. On the other extreme you can get hardened steel molds that will get you into the millions of pieces. They're slower to make but once you have them, its more likely the rough handling and setup of the tool will do more to wear it out then the actual plastic part production. The price of one relative to the other is an order of magnitude, but there are a lot of options in between.

Its also worth noting that when GW scraps a production line it can recoup a lot of money selling the molds for scrap. Even the existing plastic product can be recycled; with certain plastics you can even grind up and reuse the plastic to mold new product though it requires a certain proportion of raw material to reused material. Another use for scrapped plastic is that it can be ground to powder and mixed into certain resins as a filler like with Finecast.

 EVIL INC wrote:
The machines they have have paid for themselves years ag so the only cost on that end is new molds and raw plastic to put in. Without having to pay for the machines any longer, they are able to put funds that other newer companies would have to put towards them into paying for the new molds.

The machines will still need maintenance and won't last forever so some depreciation needs to be accounted for, but there's no leasing/outsourcing costs there.

The expensive part is the mould; I get the impression cheaper moulds can be made for about £3,000 these days, when they were maybe £100,000 30 years ago.

There's obviously design costs and such as well, but with huge print runs those drop to pennies an item, and with CAD a lot of the work is pre-done.

With a different corporate mindset GW could utterly crush all of its rivals. It has everything in house and the cost to produce kits for them is very low. They could Wal-Mart everyone else and lower the price to the point that everyone else would seem expensive compared to them. Instead they try to position themselves as some sort of prestige product. This by nature requires a ruinously high cost to prevent the riff-raff from being able to afford it. We can not have the peasants owning Empire Greatswords! Egads!

Frankly it works on some people, but it has the opposite effect on others. Time will tell if enough people have reached the breaking point with regard to cost. I have been incorrectly predicting this would happen for many years now. At this point I just think they will last forever and Warhammer will evolve in to a pastime like Formula One racing. Players will need corporate sponsors to help pay for their models and will have to paint advertisements on shoulder pads and bases.

The main obstacle is the cost of design and software. I think they use Powershape and Delcam, both of which are not cheap. The best thing is that those programs do lot of the work for you. They have pioneered milling directly in to the metal and eliminated the EDM sinker process, from what I understand.

Getting the parts run is not that bad. Many companies with modern machinery have a "lights out" manufacturing process where the machine is turned on and then can run on its own with no supervision. It send alerts via phone or internet if it gets an alarm. Even with staffing a single operator can monitor numerous machines.

I am the guy on the blog with his own plastic machine in the shop. It is about 40 years old and I got it for scrap metal price. I am not really a company but I do make bits in my spare time. I have been working a lot at my regular job so have not got a chance to make new things lately.

I use aluminum to make molds. Some have run at least 20,000 shots. This ancient machine spirit keeps groaning away and making parts long after it was destined for the scrap heap. I enjoy it and it is a challenging hobby. I also make a few bucks selling things so it all works out.

The actual maintanance is done with employees already on the payroll who are trained in maintaining and upkeep of the machines and molds. it is rare that a part needs to be replaced. The machines i work on run literally 24 hours a day 7 days a week only being shut down on a few of the national holidays and long enough for mold and color changes. And these are the heavy duty machines and molds that take a LOT of rough treatment. In the last year, they have had to order less than 10 replacement parts for the entire plant and within the first day of each of those parts use, they (and the downtime) were paid for through production.

 Jehan-reznor wrote:
Damned i was reading a blog a while ago about a guy who has a small company making plastic inserts and slotta basses and even figures, he could estimate the costs forgot the name :(

Ken from Proxie Models?


Automatically Appended Next Post:
...and it looks like that's a big yes!

Ah! online cost estimator for the whole thing... funny that!
http://www.custompartnet.com/estimate/injection-molding/
Go Play!

Go to this place and off you go:
http://quickparts.com/ToolingProduction/RapidInjection/CaseStudy.aspx
Injection molding is a very mature process,

http://www.rodongroup.com/case-study-plastic-injection-molded-polystyrene-diagnostic-kit-for-the-medical-industry

These guys even provide a free book to help:
http://info.rodongroup.com/ebook-download-request-form

Cool! My off the cuff guesses at a normal sprue worked out to ~$30,000 for a 10" by 10" x 1" mold with single slide and only using 2% of the volume with "50 features" at 82 cents per part if 100,000 pounded out.

I like this kind of stuff you guys ask, I find such neat things.

GW spends a very small amount (relative to everything else they spend) on tooling each year - including all the design and what not that leads up to the finished molds.

As mentioned, since everything is done in house - they pay relatively small premiums to actually create a mold (ignoring for a second the labor of the operators). It is hard to do specific calculations on what it would take for a mold to be profitable - but based off from GW's price structure, it is significantly lower than it would be for...pretty much anyone else.

The cost of the mold blank itself is pretty low - few hundred to a thousand dollars. Machine time adds up a bit, that is where you often get hammered with using services. Cutting a simple cavity is pretty quick and cheap (brackets and other bits that do not require a lot of polish).

Miniature molds tend to need a pretty smooth surface, so companies who are running mills for producing molds will have a higher machine time as they work there way down to the final finish (and probably do the final finish by hand). If they are using EDM to produce the tooling - they will have the cost of the more expensive (both to purchase and to run) machines as well as a multi step process to get to your final mold. It ends up being less labor intensive and more toy expensive though. Once you have the toys though - they only make money when they run.

When all is said and done though - even with the labor - each mold probably "costs" GW in the $4-6K range. Pretty low bar for recouping costs.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 aka_mythos wrote:

 Breotan wrote:
There is also the material the mold is made from. For high print run sprues, you need a sturdier metal than for limited run sprues. This allows GW to cut costs a bit on the low run kits.

Just to add to what you're saying. There are a good variety of alloys that can be used for the mold. The cheapest molds can be made of aluminum and can be good for up to no more than 10,000 parts if the parts removal isn't rough. With the generally soft plastic GW uses and their part complexity you might get 3000-4000 from the cheapest molds. These types of molds are usually used for prototype runs, to temporarily ramp up production, or as stop gaps while steel molds which take longer are finished.

Not sure where that data is coming from - but you can get a few thousand shots out of an epoxy mold. Descent quality aluminum molds will last for tens of thousands - while the higher end alloys get into the hundreds of thousands of shots. Steel tooling has its place, but it isn't really needed for hobby products - even for GW.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

kenofyork wrote:
Lots of good stuff from Ken

As an added note here - I have seen several EDM rams go through the local industrial auctions. Some of them get picked up by jewelry store type places (they use them for creating the dies for signet rings and collectible coins). One of the companies I use to get photoetched parts from has also gotten into the wire EDM business, and the prices for short runs on the EDM have gotten competitive with short run electrochemical machining.

Yeah, the tooling costs are negligible for GW.

The limiting factor is time, both in design and in casting.

Design, sure, but not casting. These machines bang out sprues every second or so 24/7 and they don't have to pay someone for a production run. The only real down time is changing the mould (how long does that take?).

Sure resin casting is a much slower process, but man other companies manage fine with resin too.

Here's Devil's advocate to the "GW in-house production is cheaper": nearly all model kit manufacturers have discontinued their in-house production and moved the production to China.

The machine, material etc. cost surely same whether you're in UK or China (ie. not much, once you get the machine running), however there are still are personnel costs and they're much higher in UK.
The big advantage GW probably has is agility: if they are short of something they just start producing it straight away, instead of having to go through ordering process, probably waiting to get some production quota from manufacturing etc.

Herzlos wrote:
Design, sure, but not casting. These machines bang out sprues every second or so 24/7 and they don't have to pay someone for a production run. The only real down time is changing the mould (how long does that take?).

Changing the mold, plus a limited number of machines. How many molds does GW have? In the triple digits? We're talking maybe a few hours per mold per year, and every time they tool a new one, the available time for all of them goes down.

Backfire wrote:
Here's Devil's advocate to the "GW in-house production is cheaper": nearly all model kit manufacturers have discontinued their in-house production and moved the production to China.

The machine, material etc. cost surely same whether you're in UK or China (ie. not much, once you get the machine running), however there are still are personnel costs and they're much higher in UK.
The big advantage GW probably has is agility: if they are short of something they just start producing it straight away, instead of having to go through ordering process, probably waiting to get some production quota from manufacturing etc.

Outsourcing is generally cheaper in the short term but more expensive in the long term.

 SilverMK2 wrote:

Backfire wrote:
Here's Devil's advocate to the "GW in-house production is cheaper": nearly all model kit manufacturers have discontinued their in-house production and moved the production to China.

The machine, material etc. cost surely same whether you're in UK or China (ie. not much, once you get the machine running), however there are still are personnel costs and they're much higher in UK.
The big advantage GW probably has is agility: if they are short of something they just start producing it straight away, instead of having to go through ordering process, probably waiting to get some production quota from manufacturing etc.

Outsourcing is generally cheaper in the short term but more expensive in the long term.

Normally it is a question of quantities. If I have the need to create 1 mold a year (or 5 or 10...) - it is cheaper for me to have someone else make the mold for me. If I have to make 50 molds a year, it is cheaper to make them in house. There are also other issues in play for moving manufacturing overseas (compliance expenses, union issues, facilities...) that are not directly connected to the cost of manufacturing, but impact the decision of what to do with it.

That said - there is actually an increase in the number of companies bringing manufacturing out of China. Precision manufacturing tends to be about a wash now when everything is taken into account. You will still see most of your big box type items made over there for some time - but things that require a high fit and finish do not. Where they get made has shifted though (in particular away from previous industrial centers to new industrial centers...in the US, out of the upper Midwest and into the South East).

Setting all those new shops up has kept me pretty busy the last few years.

I've heard it sad a major reason why GW produces its stock in the UK is security.
If they shipped the production to China, they'll lose control of the designs.
For them, IP is everything. Having counterfeit goods made indirectly using GW's own machinery flooding the market would kill them.

 lord_blackfang wrote:

Herzlos wrote:
Design, sure, but not casting. These machines bang out sprues every second or so 24/7 and they don't have to pay someone for a production run. The only real down time is changing the mould (how long does that take?).

Changing the mold, plus a limited number of machines. How many molds does GW have? In the triple digits? We're talking maybe a few hours per mold per year, and every time they tool a new one, the available time for all of them goes down.

At 1/second, an hours production run would produce 3600 sprues, so realistically GW may only need to run a mould for a few hours a year to keep up with demand. Sure if they add the number of moulds the available time per mould will drop, but they'd need to have a lot of moulds for them to not be able to run for 2 hours a year. Assuming a mould per working day means they can use about 260 moulds a year per machine, and get about 25,000 sprues per mould. I don't know how many machines they have, or how long a change takes though.

At a very rough estimate, £100m in mini's, at £5/sprue, GW are making about 20,000,000 sprues a year, which would take about 5555 hours at 1/second or 694 8-hour shifts. So they'd probably need 3 machines running at a time at most. The figure is likely to be much lower than that as I'd imagine it'd be longer shifts and a much lower sprue count. They'd probably be able to get by on 2 machines.

Herzlos wrote:
Design, sure, but not casting. These machines bang out sprues every second or so 24/7 and they don't have to pay someone for a production run. The only real down time is changing the mould (how long does that take?).

If my 2 months of experience working in the plastic injection molding department at a lawn mower factory is any indication...30 min to an hour. Thats assuming both companies use the same sort of machine. The "Tool" is a small metal "box" with the mold in two halves. Overhead cranes and winches are used to move the mold across the department and its lowered down into the machine itself. Its the same machine, the tool/mold is interchangeable.

And it might take a bit of "calibration" and fiddling to get the machine running properly. The first few parts of a production run tend to have defects such as "short shots" - missing / miscast parts where the plastic did not fill the mold properly (which I'm told is because the tool is "cold" and needs to "heat up).

My employer also has a LOT of machines - around 50 or so.

I don't claim any real authority on the matter, the last 5 weeks have just been informative.

Thanks. How big are the parts you're moulding compared to GW sprues?

I'm sure GW moulds will still need some lifting equipment but assuming it's not going to be as bulky as say the body housing parts.

uh, they range from tiny to BIG. Lawn mower components. From tiny plastic screws, to big plastic chassis. We remove the sprues and pack the parts into tubs, that are taken away and stored in a warehouse until they're needed in the assembly department. GW's process is simpler, because they don't assemble the models we do (the lazy sods ).

Like I said, assuming they're using the same machines, all you need to do is use a winch or crane to lower the mold/tool itself into the machine then screw it in or whatever. The mold or tool is the size of a small box, but its solid steel. A technician came round to change the tool on the machine I was operating over to a new tool and I was watching him but then got told off by the supervisor for "loitering during a tool change". (this was in the last 10 min of my shift mind you - everyone hates the supervisor in question ). So I didn't watch the entire tool change process.

In a single 12 hour shift ( I work weekends, sat and sun), I might personally make and pack up to 1000 parts. Thats if I'm assigned to a single machine. Some machines are a bit more involved and require that an operator personally places or fits parts onto a mold, activate the machine which injects and adds more plastic to the part you put in, then you take the new combined part out and pack it into a tub.

Other machines produce much simpler parts, a robotic arm extracts it from the mold and deposits it onto a conveyer belt that drops the part into a tub, which when full, Operators will close with a lid and put it on a palette for the FLT drivers to take away.


This is the sort of machine used by my employer.



The machine stays put, you just change the tool or mold inside.

Very interesting, thanks

I'd kind of assumed they were automatically popped out of the mould with some sort of rod and they just fell into a bin at the side, but I've never actually seen it happen.

Herzlos wrote:
Very interesting, thanks

I'd kind of assumed they were automatically popped out of the mould with some sort of rod and they just fell into a bin at the side, but I've never actually seen it happen.

They might be.

Some machines drop the parts directly into a tub (if they're not fragile, or cosmetic damage like scratches are not an issue).

Some machines use robot arms to deposit the parts onto a conveyer belt, which might drop the parts into a tub (like above, if the parts are tumble packed), or carry them to an operator who will collect the parts and carefully pack them himself, if a "high cosmetic finish" is necessary.

And some machines require an operator to reach into the machine and physically remove the part from the mold himself. (which is what I've been doing for the last 2 weekends).


GW's model sprues are fragile, in the sense that they have small fragile parts like swords and bows which might be damaged and snapped if the sprues are just being dropped into a tub (some machines eject their parts with considerable force into a plastic tub - I cringe to imagine that happening to sprues of models). And GW uses a much softer plastic than that used in lawn mowers.

So I imagine that GW probably has an operator for each machine physically remove the sprues from the mold, rather than just letting them drop into tubs. Certainly, operators will be needed to check sprues for flash and short shots (miscasts) and to pack the sprues into boxes.

Steelmage99 wrote:

Spoiler:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
The colossal investment required for plastic wargame figure production is reflected in the fact that all the small companies doing 28mm historical figures now, are punching out brand new designs for 30 pence each, compared to over £1 for the very cheapest, oldest most limited GW sets like snapfit Tyranid Termagants.

Is that sarcasm?
I think that is sarcasm....
I am almost positive it's sarcasm.
Does anybody know if it is sarcasm?
It might be sarcasm...
Or it might be sarcasm....
On the other hand it could be sarcasm.



Sarcasm....

Well, this got me well done.

Always love seeing Ken of Proxie Models share his thoughts about these things, and thanks to Sean O'Brien and Shadow Captain Edithae for doing the same!

I've been learning a LOT about this process the last year when designing a part and having it quoted for injection molding. It is extremely interesting, and I agree that with GW having everything in-house they're likely able to make a short-run mold and get their investment back on it while other companies can't as easily. It is one of the things they do really well, and I hope that they focus on that and push the envelope on what kind of models they can have injection molded.

Changing the mold and getting new good parts out of it can be done is less than an hour. "Fiddling" or adjusting a machine only takes a few minutes. Where time kicks in is starting the machine up from "cold" as it takes a while for them to heat up. This is why they run 24/7 and work on rotating 12 hour shifts to keep them going.

Design, sure, but not casting. These machines bang out sprues every second or so 24/7 and they don't have to pay someone for a production run. The only real down time is changing the mould (how long does that take?).

Changing the mold, plus a limited number of machines. How many molds does GW have? In the triple digits? We're talking maybe a few hours per mold per year, and every time they tool a new one, the available time for all of them goes down.

The cycle time depends on the size of the sprue. Smaller ones like bases can be shot in 5 seconds. Medium sprues like a SM Tactical Squad would be from 5-7 seconds. Larger sprues like the LOTR Mumakil are about 10-15 seconds.

Changing out the tool takes about 20 minutes.

I don't know how many machines they have, or how long a change takes though.

Most of the time, unless it's a new release, they tend to run the sprue until they get a full year's supply of that particular sprue so it won't be needed again and can go into storage.

The last time I was at the GW HQ (in 2007) they had 16 injection molding machines. Since then they have expanded the department, but I don't know how many more machines they bought.

Thanks. How big are the parts you're moulding compared to GW sprues?

I'm sure GW moulds will still need some lifting equipment but assuming it's not going to be as bulky as say the body housing parts.

GW has several overhead cranes for lifting tools into position.

Very interesting, thanks I'd kind of assumed they were automatically popped out of the mould with some sort of rod and they just fell into a bin at the side, but I've never actually seen it happen.

The molds GW uses have ejector pins to push the sprue out of the tool onto a conveyor belt. The belt deposits the sprue into a box so the staffer can stack them into a storage box.

In Memphis we had one person operating 5 machines.