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So I bought a second hand tantalus from a guy other other day: Its in a forgeworld box, with the correct product tag, has forgeworld bags inside, and has a receipt from the warhammer store this guy bought it from....so you can imagine I think it's real....however, my god is it an awful mold quality. I've been working on cleaning this up for hours, and I still have most of the little pieces as well as a ton of greenstuff corrections to go. There is gak in every hole, poor line up of parts, holes, lots of bubbles, weird not-flat surfaces that are supposed to be flat, and short shots. It's been several years since I've put together any forgeworld, but there is no way I would have not remembered how messy this is.

Did I get a gak recaster ripoff, or is forgeworld quality actually this bad?

Hard to say for sure but I have had forgeworld casts of that age that were far worse.

It was much worse, unfortunately, I had already started cleaning up before I thought to actually take pictures.

All of the Forge World stuff I have bought recently directly from GW has actually been pretty good (and better than the recast stuff I've gotten).

I've gotten a few older OOP items on ebay and some of them are not great, but probably not really this bad.

That said only the issue shown in the last picture seems like something that isn't relatively easily resolved.

From my experience and from what I've seen online, Forgeworld's smaller kits are often great, but their larger kits are plagued with these sorts of problems.

The last big kit I bought from them was the Armoured Proteus Land Raider, and it was riddled with concave panels that should have been flat, massive mould lines, and parts that simply didn't fit. I sent them pics of the worst offending pieces and they replaced the kit... and the replacement was just as bad, and is still sitting in a box downstairs a decade later, as I couldn't bring myself to build a second one.

That's a good point, the stuff I've gotten has all been pretty small, the largest being a Deredeo dreadnought which didn't really have any issues at all.

I haven't gotten anything with large flat panels.

Watch the Squidmar video on YouTube where they're trying to assemble the Tau Manta. It's appalling the amount of work they have to do to get a £1200 model to fit together properly.

I had a couple of the FW eldars vehicles about 10 years ago, a couple of hornets and the warp hunter, I think. They were just like that.

My opinion is the notion of using the terms 'FW' and 'quality' together is a pretty big oxymoron.
I have bought forgeworld stuff which only needed mold release agent washed off; Thanatar-Calix, a Vultarax, Titan Tech-Priest, one pack of Scyllax (1 of 3), my first 12 Thallax and a Macrocarid Explorator.

Pimus Redoubt, every imperial knight, Warhound Titan etc were all pretty shocking when they arrived and according to the email from FW were exactly the standard FW expects from their finished products.
Bowed roof on the primus redoubt, mold-slip on every Titan-tier model i have ever been sent; The pair of Storm Eagles are basicly still not finished because of how much of a bloody chore they were to work on.
Gave up on fixing stuff on the Avenger Strike Fighter and started cutting off ruined external details.
The pair of Minotaur Artillery Tanks are stalled mid conversion due to 'construction issues' from material shrinkage.

Someone please inform the circus animals producing resin for FW that thermal expansion is a ratio based on the depth of the material and they need to stop making components that are large blocks of resin without an internal cavity?

That and they need dedicated cooling racks for the parts.
Even tubs of steel BBs would be preferable to the flat surface they obviously dump cast parts onto.

Sorry, /rant.

Yeah FW seems to have always had this reputation for poor quality. I've had numerous kits from them, including a couple of Titans, and I honestly can't say the price warrants the quality. Their customer service is top-notch in that they'll replace anything too crappy, no questions asked, but for what you pay you shouldn't have to do that in the first place. Hell, I've had recasts of significantly better quality than the FW equivalent.

 SirDonlad wrote:
My opinion is the notion of using the terms 'FW' and 'quality' together is a pretty big oxymoron..

A large part of the reason that Forgeworld is the quality that it is, is that you keep giving them thousands of pounds, despite being unsatisfied with the product quality.

Just to kind of point out, most of the kits with the bad rep are gone now and the resin that FW products use changed some time ago.
The more recent kits are far more consistent and good quality.
Some people just have an inability to move past kits released over a decade ago.

 Gert wrote:
Just to kind of point out, most of the kits with the bad rep are gone now and the resin that FW products use changed some time ago.
The more recent kits are far more consistent and good quality.
Some people just have an inability to move past kits released over a decade ago.

I bought a Vulture a couple of years ago along with the Punisher Cannons. The cannons are supposed to use part of the sprue as a spacer to get the positioning right. Said spacer was awfully malformed and obviously wrong but they shipped it anyways. The tail stabilizers were warped, and the body that's composed of just a few big chunks that ought to slot together took about an hour of sanding and gap-filling to fit. The only reason it wasn't a complete nightmare to assemble is because half the kit is a plastic Valkyrie anyways.

A friend bought a Fire Raptor last year and gave up after six hours of trying to make warped body panels fit. It's an irredeemable piece of gak and literally no better than recasts.

So for me at least, no, this isn't some ancient grudge from the 2000s. Forge World has always been garage kit quality at premium prices.

New FW models are generaly okey. Some stuff can come broken etc. But some older stuff, can be horrible. I think the worse things are when you have a very old land raider, buy doors/guns/etc for them try to put them in and you find out that someone had to have had "lost" the original molds and they made new one, but the thing is smaller, so suddenly parts don't fit. Had a guy at my old store have two parts of a Ad Mecha tank, which were clearly different size, and they were both direct from FW, not second hand or anything.

 catbarf wrote:
I bought a Vulture a couple of years ago along with the Punisher Cannons. The cannons are supposed to use part of the sprue as a spacer to get the positioning right. Said spacer was awfully malformed and obviously wrong but they shipped it anyways. The tail stabilizers were warped, and the body that's composed of just a few big chunks that ought to slot together took about an hour of sanding and gap-filling to fit. The only reason it wasn't a complete nightmare to assemble is because half the kit is a plastic Valkyrie anyways.

A friend bought a Fire Raptor last year and gave up after six hours of trying to make warped body panels fit. It's an irredeemable piece of gak and literally no better than recasts.

So for me at least, no, this isn't some ancient grudge from the 2000s. Forge World has always been garage kit quality at premium prices.

The Vulture. A kit released nearly 20 years ago. I'm not expecting much but did you at least read at all what I wrote or did you just want to "gotcha" me, and then utterly fail at doing so?

The fire raptor is 15years old, and as cat said it is very bad too. The Ad Mecha tanks are all rather modern vehicles, and are very hit or miss.

The Mechanicum tanks are also pushing a decade.
Just to reiterate, I am not saying these kits were always good quality or that they never had problems.
What I am saying is that the FW of today should not be judged by the FW of a decade ago.
The idea that FW is a terrible product should be ditched because it isn't the case anymore.

 Gert wrote:
The Mechanicum tanks are also pushing a decade.
Just to reiterate, I am not saying these kits were always good quality or that they never had problems.
What I am saying is that the FW of today should not be judged by the FW of a decade ago.
The idea that FW is a terrible product should be ditched because it isn't the case anymore.

.......this kit has a lot code of 2021.....yes I am judging them harshly. I really don't care that it's a mold from 2011, if anything, they've had ten years to sort this out. The shortshot looking stuff especially (picture 3)


Automatically Appended Next Post:
When it's so bad I'm deeply questioning if it's a recast or not, that's saying something.

Hell's bloody horses can nobody on this site read?

Yes, the kit you have bought is not good quality. This is because it was designed many many years ago and as such uses the older resin type.
In that time FW has changed its manufacturing process for making new kits to stop these issues from plaguing new products.
The big sellers, such as the Spartan and Thunderhawk, got redone but you aren't going to get that with the Tantalus because GW probably sells about five a year.

 Gert wrote:
Hell's bloody horses can nobody on this site read?

Yes, the kit you have bought is not good quality. This is because it was designed many many years ago and as such uses the older resin type.
In that time FW has changed its manufacturing process for making new kits to stop these issues from plaguing new products.
The big sellers, such as the Spartan and Thunderhawk, got redone but you aren't going to get that with the Tantalus because GW probably sells about five a year.

Honestly it shouldn't matter how old the kit is. For the amount you pay it's not a big ask for a bit of QC on FW's part.

True if they can't do them right, they shouldn't be selling them at all. But FW and GW does this all the time. People buy in to stuff expecting a level of quality, then wait for it to be fixed/replaced, and after some time, for those not planning to be in the hobby for decades it is just too much of a hassle to wait 9-12 months for a potential fix to a problem. It is faster and more convinient to just quit or get the model from other sources then GW or FW.

To me a lot of GW actions feel as if they knew that in 5-10 years, they are just not going to be able to deal with how popular their core games are, and how easy it is going to be 3d print.

 Gert wrote:
Hell's bloody horses can nobody on this site read?

Yes, the kit you have bought is not good quality. This is because it was designed many many years ago and as such uses the older resin type.
In that time FW has changed its manufacturing process for making new kits to stop these issues from plaguing new products.
The big sellers, such as the Spartan and Thunderhawk, got redone but you aren't going to get that with the Tantalus because GW probably sells about five a year.

Can you not read? The OP is asking if this kit was a knock off and the answer is probably not, a FW kit of this age is likely to have pretty crap quality. Which is what everyone is saying.

Looks like we found the resident FW simp. FW has gak quality control that got a bit better recently, because they went through the pieces years ago and chucked a bunch wholesale. Further, they don't give AF because people keep paying them for garbage. It's almost certainly real, FW doesn't care about product quality.

 ingtaer wrote:
Can you not read? The OP is asking if this kit was a knock off and the answer is probably not, a FW kit of this age is likely to have pretty crap quality. Which is what everyone is saying.

Please kindly quote the post where I said it was a knockoff or didn't acknowledge that the older kits have worse QC. The OP also asked if this was FW quality so I'll thank you to get of your high horse Mr MOD.

 Gibblets wrote:
Looks like we found the resident FW simp. FW has gak quality control that got a bit better recently, because they went through the pieces years ago and chucked a bunch wholesale. Further, they don't give AF because people keep paying them for garbage. It's almost certainly real, FW doesn't care about product quality.

If you take a look again, you'll see I very specifically acknowledge that older FW kits sometimes have poor quality and that the OP asked if this was a common case with FW products, which it no longer is as the materials and production have changed significantly since the Tantalus was made in the early 2000s.

 Gert wrote:
The Vulture. A kit released nearly 20 years ago. I'm not expecting much but did you at least read at all what I wrote or did you just want to "gotcha" me, and then utterly fail at doing so?

Yes, I read your post. I also read the ambiguous caveats about how 'most' of the kits with a bad rep are gone, and that 'more' recent kits are 'more' consistent, making it sound like these aren't problems anymore, so I wanted to highlight that Forge World is still actively producing crap.

I'm not holding some decade-old grudge, I'm judging them by the products they're still selling. There's no way to tell just from looking at the webstore how old a kit is, and if those old kits are irredeemably gakky and for whatever reason they're incapable of producing them better than the recasters, they shouldn't be selling them (let alone at three-digit prices).

Or at the very least, you don't need to be making excuses for them.

 Gert wrote:
Just to kind of point out, most of the kits with the bad rep are gone now seems like many old kits are still sold, as multiple people claim to have still bought them in the last few years and the resin that FW products use changed some time ago. Are the old kits still being sold by FW using old or new resin?
The more recent kits are far more consistent and good quality. Can you verify that newer kits are in fact better quality? Also, how can a consumer easily tell if they're buying an old or new kit?
Some people just have an inability to move past kits released over a decade ago. Unnecessary hostility. Everyone else is the problem though, amirite?

. . .

I used to do commission work back in the early 00's, and I got a lot of FW pieces to do, and boy did it ever turn me off using resin for big mechanical parts. On the other end, I got some Tyranid stuff secondhand, and the big organic pieces are reasonable because I'm not seeing the usual issues with warped flat panels or tight mechanical parts that have to fit together nicely. I've only got the Harridan left to do, we'll see how that goes.

The only reason I have some Spartans is because they came out in plastic.

The largest legit item I've had from FW is a kytan and the resin parts were largely immaculate, only a minor warping on one joint and a single bubble on a piston.

That said, I imagine older kits weren't as well designed for casting or used a more archaic process. That said, it's not like they'll use a different resin for old or new kits, they'll use the same brew for everything they cast I'd imagine?

But FW has never been perfect nor the dumpster fire some people pretend it to be from my limited exposure.

Dudeface wrote:

That said, I imagine older kits weren't as well designed for casting or used a more archaic process. That said, it's not like they'll use a different resin for old or new kits, they'll use the same brew for everything they cast I'd imagine?

I wonder about this too. I'd think the same resin would be used throughout unless there was some incompatability with older moulds. Maybe a pressure temperature treatment thing? I really have no idea.

But FW has never been perfect nor the dumpster fire some people pretend it to be from my limited exposure.

The only aspect of "dumpster fire" to me is the mismatch between price you pay for the quality often recieved. I've gotten recasts of the same piece that were better quality than the FW one. I had two Land Raider Reinforced Armor kits, one was decent, one was really rough. I got two more from a recaster because FW discontinued it (I hate buying from recasters, I wouldn't have done it if FW still offered it), and the recasts were in better shape than at least one of the legit FW ones.

What also bugs me is when I compare FW to Armorcast. I had one of their Mad Cat/Timber Wolf battlemechs, and that kit was immaculate aside from a bit of flash iirc. It was also a different resin that seemed to be less prone to heat related issues. Seemed like warping never even occurred to it, those long straight pieces were straight!

Just to give some experience for a better overview:

I got
Carnodon: 5/10 Quality. Some details were to this, a lot of bending necessary for the tracks and issues during painting. On the other hand I'm only 50% sure it was Forgeworld as I bought it in a shop and the whole ordeal was a bit fishy
Malcador Battletank 7/10. Tracks fit pretty good, the back of the turret was a bit wonky, some of the weapons needed to be bend straight, but nothing major.
Malcador Infernus 9-10/10 I would say. I recently started working on it. All large parts are straight, even tiny bits look good and everything is formed correctly. Misses the 10 only because I can't yet say if there will be issues during building and painting
Gorgon Heavy Transport: Haven't started building it, so only from visual inspection 7+/10. Everything seems to be straight, nothing is obviously malformed. Don't know yet if there will be issues
Valkyrie Skytalon: same as the Gorgon.

Overall I would agree: for their pricetag the Quality should reliably be 8+. But for me personally they still have some really great looking tanks. Great enough, that I still find that pricetag acceptable at least for their IG stuff.

I paid ~180$ for a model that has gaps so big I can see my desk though them. No chance for Customer support, since it's second hand. Great. Guess I'm not buying into 30k Thanks for the info guys, wanted to be sure that the seller wasn't being shady or anything, and it sounds like the shady is actually FW.