Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Some quick scale ups to ungor and gors. I grabbed two types of ungor to be sure we were good here.

Very nice, very delicate but not terrifyingly so. Just got to get em painted up now!

 ingtaer wrote:
Very nice, very delicate but not terrifyingly so. Just got to get em painted up now!

Next project, after initial mold.

Where we are at, 2D instructions have been sent out to roughly 6 companies with capabilities in EDM in the US. New quotes are being gathered for a MUD mold set. As this was not our background, we had the mold designers put in a good word on ideal parts. They've been awesome and a life saver!

Mold 1 shows proof of concept for the models, signalling that we can do a plastic job.
Painting the model will then show proof of work
Proof of work, we build kickstarter page (Tim also does photoshop! I swear he can do everything)

Kickstarter hopefully goes well, and we build our fauns and centaurs (and any other add ons) we would love to kill the goal on day 1. Or at the least, hit it within 30 days. Lot of work has been put in, I think people will be amazed at the level of detail these fauns will come out to.

How stands your projected date for the kickstarter to go live?

 ingtaer wrote:
How stands your projected date for the kickstarter to go live?

Holidays are going to kill us on time, but if we can get the molder down payment in, mold will still take 2-3 weeks. Painting, maybe 1-2 weeks with busy schedule of painter. Kickstarter page, Tim does stuff part time for each client, so up in the air. Projected date is into 2019. Hopefully before spring. Ill keep updates going.

Sculpts are done, fixes are applied to males, will apply to females, and centaurs just need a round of refining and line of draft work.


Fauns we can pack to a mold design, get them worked on, and get ready for the next mold, since we have them in the format we need.


We have ALOT of parts, and it takes Tim 20 minutes each part to convert something into XT, or longer if the angle of draft is a challenge. Now multiply all the parts for the males, on top of the females. Its why we have been down so long. That and getting them into proper line of draft.

Probably a blessing that you will be post holidays, one would have to check kickstarter but I cant imagine that its a good time to launch, seems Feb at earliest would garner the largest cash injection.

I was thinking earlier on the centaurs and was wondering, you are not going integral bases nor rails for slotta bases are you at all worried about the connection points when it comes to gluing them to bases? it seems that one would have two/three very narrow points to glue with the associated issues that causes.

Yeah, the ungors have small feet which are difficult to glue to a base.
Surfboards are quite a handy way around this, but some people do not like these.

 StygianBeach wrote:
Yeah, the ungors have small feet which are difficult to glue to a base.
Surfboards are quite a handy way around this, but some people do not like these.

Ideally going to be sold with kings of war or whfb in mind. The feet have enough contact surface that the models will hold steadily with some glue. With the horse hooves, we could increase the surface area for gluing. And if need be, we can make "surfboards" as most horses I notice have this type of function. In the sense we might be able to just craft both, as the polls were split.

Refashioning of the upside down and upside spears.

Render of the female faun arm (back to the business of line of draft female parts). And an example of how you can include bases on the sprue frame.

Based on what you see, more or less eager to see us go down the rabbit hole?

Are the sprues from Shadows of Brimstone? These samples from the manufacturer? If so then that looks very promising indeed.

 ingtaer wrote:
Are the sprues from Shadows of Brimstone? These samples from the manufacturer? If so then that looks very promising indeed.

Same ones.


I've been creating a rolodex of HIPS molders for myself at the moment, assessing if the quality here is interesting enough to try on our fauns. Can be achieved in 40 days, and sample in hand to show before, and the tooling is affordable.

Seems like a fantastic option.

Freeform appears to be a faster way for some of the molders to get from A to B. Quick refinement of STLs into STP. Pictures as so. The molder we are looking into is quoting a 40 day lead time once we have money in. The tooling sample sent for verification. Tooling costs had some massive savings when allowed to reuse a base, and just tool an aluminum insert.


Less wear and tear, softer, and has a good endurance for shot life.

Those are certainly very promising!

Going to be the guinea pig first, before I subject it to kickstarter.

Tim's going to be doing some minor fixes to help with the after freeform CNC comparison, wire will be going in, and we will be on the road to getting our first mold tooled. Here are some examples that came up.

So the new mould maker is Chinese? If so 40 day lead time seems really optimistic with their New Year starting on the 5th of Feb.
Looks good though.

Had to be, us companies want to make each mold 1,000,000 shot worthy, and even a mud mold, the tooling they wanted was 60k. Reshoring was 28k. We aimed to reduce tooling costs wherever we could, and finally negotiated a tooled insert in aluminum. People keep shrugging with aluminum molding, but it doesn't wear out the instruments as fast as garden variety steel. 40 days is an estimate, but not out of line with lead times of this type. We will see how the test run goes. Have to be optimistic, or I'll never get anything done . No ones out money for my risk

Have you looked into companies like Proto Labs? https://www.protolabs.com/

seems pretty streamlined, you upload your files and they send you a quote .. never got too far with them myself because all of my files are STLs done in Zbrush and they say they need to be CAD based files.

Protolabs was a consideration, but they are best for small parts, and not ideal for family molds. The silicone molds they do are not necessarily ideal for this run. You want a mold maker, not a part shop. I encourage asking if you don't believe.

File size needs to be small as well.

Stp files in this range were 12gb

Took 32gigs of ram to render, the part shops dealt with 100mb. Equipment needs differed. Even the moldmakers were hot and miss.

It is great to see further progress, and good on you for taking a risk. I think you made a smart gamble, but only time will tell.

Worst case I learned how to make a sprue, and can try other projects . Doing this taught me more about toy design and manufacturing then a class could.

Good luck with it!

Finally was able to get this broken up. So isolating the plates, was able to get at viewing different parts of the mold. Remarkable difference, as the plates barely touched 50mb, let alone the 12gb with the 3D models. First hand look at designs for a mold for our project, cool stuff. Simple MUD mold, A and B side, screws hold it together. ALOT of screws.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 kestral wrote:
Good luck with it!

Thank you.

So much involved in mold making! Thanks for keeping us posted. And how are the Centaurs coming along?

That will be a stretch goal, 2.6k quoted to get them in line of draft, time modified to adapt to parts. Going through the rounds to get the first tooling started.

so turned out the molder was a bit callous on face details. The accuracy was in the ball park, but in the way of the representative handling the matter, we had to stop their process. A small set back.

But, we had a friend reach out, and have a new lead to get us from 0.02mm down to 0.01mm, and 2-3 week lead times.

Samples should be done in February.

That sucks to hear mate, hope it wasn't too acrimonious.
But then there was good news as well! Look forward to seeing the samples.