"10mm Plastics" Topic

I don't usually do this sort of thing, but I'm trying to bring to the attention of those who were not aware, Wargames Factory currently has on their potential "to do list" 10mm Confederate and Union soldiers. I've been very impressed with the quality of their minis in the past, and they've proven with one of their recent sculpts that they are willing to do small scales. So if you're interested in getting some fairly cheap, fairly high quality 10mm ACW minis, please preorder a few sprues:
Union: link
Confederate: link

Thanks for your time, and before someone mentions it, I didn't put either of these up, so I get nothing if they go into production except for some (probably) cheaper 10mm ACW minis, and the definite exposure for both ACW gaming and 10mm gaming.

P.S. Some of the current details in the description don't seem to fit (Union in Shell Jacket, for instance), but they don't make the sprue directly from the suggestions, and take into account feedback while they're doing initial sculpting.

Here's a question.

What would the advantage of plastics in 10mm be? WOuld they in fact be less expensive than existing metal ranges?

Bede,

Someone on one of the threads at the WF forum did a price comparison, and yes, plastics would be lower in price than metal.

Personally, I think that Warlord Games hit the right idea with making the bulk of the "rank and file" out of plastic, and using metal for the "character" & "specialty" minis.

Bede19025, I agree. With OG being around $10 USD a bag for 20 strips of 5 men, how would plastics be cheaper? I don't see the cost effectiveness of the 10mm plastic scale. It makes sense for 25mm, but for 10mm and 15mm I don't see any savings and the metal figs are far better than anything that can be created in plastic for those sizes.

The advantages are obvious.

will they be multi-part? certainly they will be usable for a whole slew of periods. Look at their Romans – 28mm and they could be anything.

I believe I pulled a 10mm WF figure out of my nose this morning. It was ready painted too – some sort of Goblin.

Pat

I guess the bigger question is how much cheaper? 10mm would be fine but will they really be a lot cheaper? The 28mm certainly are.

"I agree. With OG being around $10 USD USD a bag for 20 strips of 5 men, how would plastics be cheaper?"

Well, it might not be much cheaper than Old Glory, but it would be cheaper than any of the non-strip figures flying around. And they're talking about $3/sprue for probably 25-30 men per sprue, so it might end up being cheaper than Old Glory.

As for the quality, people say it has no chance of being nearly as high quality as metals, but WF's 28mm plastics are almost as high quality as the 28mm metals of similar ranges, from what I've seen. And how many 10mm plastics are there out there to compare to metals, at the moment? Or 15mm, for that matter?

But will the plastics come with "Flash" ?

Probably very little, if any. No more than any metals come with. The technology involved in plastic molds is very good, so newer plastics, from basically any plastic company, come with very little in the way of flash or even mold lines. From my experience, as little or less than metals.

The plastic ones may end up being around $5 USD for a sprue of around 40 men, so that's not much different that $10 USD for 20 Old Glory strips. But they have the benefit of not being in strips. And they may very well look better than the Old Glory strips.

Another benefit is weight. Individual 10mm figures are pretty light in metal, but when you have a whole army of them in a box, it starts to add up. So plastic would be lighter, and less likely to damage each other if they jostle around a bit.

Another thing is that thin parts, like rifle barrels, will be less likely to get bent and need fixing. On the other hand, if they are handled roughly, they might break, which is harder to fix then just bent. So that is kind of a plus and minus.

I guess the bottom line is that it might be a worthwhile experiment to have some 10mm plastics on the market, and find out how they compare in quality and price to metal. And it could never hurt to have another option out there to add variety and choice when it comes to figure poses. And I think they could probably have a good variety of pose variations on a single sprue, more than you'd get with most metal ranges.

It always nice to speculate when you don't have to pay the bills for those keen ideas! They become less keen ideas when you start to see the sales figures! I would warn that many may devote loyalty to some new product, but talk is cheap. I have come to the conclusion that any company that bases business decisions on the whims of 20-40 people out of a market of millions, deserves what they get. (Good or bad…but historicaly, it's been bad.)

I do wish them luck in their venture.

Tom Dye
GFI

Flash, on plastic sprues, is almost always an indicator of aging molds. Modern molds, made with computer-controlled tooling, are very close fitting and rarely exhibit any flash at all. The longer a mold is used, however, the more wear takes it's toll on the fit of the two (or more) halves, and thus flash starts to appear.

respects,

The big advantage would be how easily they would prime. With some of the metal 10s on strips it can be difficult to get the black to go into the crevices. Not that this can't easily be remedied but it does take some time waiting for the black to dry later. With plastics you spray one side, you spray the other, you stick them on your paint stick and away you go.

I don't agree with the plastic link assertion that GHQ are the "best" sculpted figures; but that is a fashion statement.

In the end if the plastic figures looked good to me, and were reasonably priced [relative to other choices] I'd probably buy a lot of them.

But if I signed up and they didn't look "good". I wouldn't.

So I don't know the value of "signing up" is for these guys?

Funny, I think the strips are easier to paint and handle than individually cast 10mm figures. I did my SYW with the strips. I think I would have gone crazy fiddling with the 60 or so per unit individual figures, gluing them to paint sticks,etc. An extra coat of primer is a small price to pay for sanity!

Pictors,

When it comes to 15mm or smaller, i always prime with the major uniform color. Thus, for CS, I use a grey primer, for federals, blue, for Austrians white, etc. Saves me a step in the painting process. :)

rmcaras, I think the purpose of having people "sign up" is for Wargames Factory to have some way to judge interest. If not many people sign up, then they'll assume there isn't enough interest to make the project worth the effort, and so they won't waste any time doing any preliminary design or sculpting work.

If a lot of people sign up, they'll at least know that, if the end product is good, there will be a market for it. Then it will be worth doing the sculpting and design work. If the figures turn out to look terrible, then nobody will order any anyway, so they won't bother actually creating the molds or whatever.

I guess there's kind of an assumption Wargames Factory is making that people are being honest, and they are only signing up if they have a genuine interest in purchasing some of them if they turn out to be good.

It goes without saying that if they are ugly, nobody is going to buy them. And if they look really great, plenty of people will buy them who didn't sign up for the pre-order. But if enough people don't sign up to demonstrate interest in the idea, we'll never know how they would have looked because they won't bother sculpting them.

I hear you Al.

But as you say, the "interest" may be a mirage; I'd like to see some of their current products. If they have 10mm sculpts in another era, that would be useful as a "pointer". Other scales may also be helpful, but less so. Presumes that the same sculptor/style is to be used.

I poked around their site some more. The 28 mm Roman figures seem serviceable, if that is any indication for say 10mm ACW.

But I am confused. They keep talking in units of "sprues"…but no one I know collects, paints and plays with sprues. They use figures. So how can one "bid" how many "sprues" they might buy if they do not know how many figures that actually is.

If the price is right, and the figures look good, I might buy 2,000 figures. How many sprues is that? 200? 100? 50? 1000?

Otherwise, they don't need to collect estimates of "sprues", they need estimates of Buyers. They mention 100 buyers and 10 sprues each. That sounds like 28mm numbers. If a sprue had 20 figures, That would mean I'd be interested in 100 sprues. But I only count 1% towards the 100 buyers, yet 10% of the sprues. So it could take a lot longer to get the requisite 100 buyers and yet 20-50-80 buyers could account for many times more than 1000 sprues.

That is just weird.

It gives an estimate of models per sprue, but until they actually go into sculpting, you can't know exactly how many per sprue. I think 20 is a fairly conservative estimate, and 35 would be fairly liberal one, but for the sake of preordering, you don't need to preorder 2000 men worth of sprues. Just a few, to get it started, and once they get it out, if you like the product (which, considering that one can give feedback on the in-progress work on compiling it, seems likely for most people interested in the period and/or scale), then you buy up to 2000.

It is, admittedly, very oddly laid out. But since they cannot give an exact number of how many models are going to be on a sprue before they put it into production. And do remember that all of the sprues in that "liberty league" are submitted by customers and wargamers, so most of them will not make it into production. But as you can see on the link, they give a rough estimate, which if you line up men on a 6"x8" area, and leave space to split them up, seems like a pretty good one in this case.

As for quality, I can only say that I've personally been very impressed with the quality of all miniatures I've seen produced by them.

One of the big advantages to this project which we discussed previously was the possibility of getting a nice variety of proper "right shoulder shift" poses, which strangely are a rarity, especially in the smaller end of the 10mm spectrum to match with GHQ and Starfort.

I have come to the conclusion that any company that bases business decisions on the whims of 20-40 people out of a market of millions, deserves what they get.

Given that a lot of wargames companies are run on the whim of the owner – for good or bad – it seems a step forwards, frankly.

Wargames Factory won't go into production until they have 1000+ signed up to each project. So they assumption that it is based on a whim is wrong. This is clearly based on good business sense i.e. 1000 individuals have shown interest and signed up to buying before production. How many companies do that?

Anyway, enough talk. I've just pre-ordered.

Well, not really 1000 individuals; it only requires at least 100. But a good point, all the same, Royal, and I agree completely.

Howard from Wargames Factory here.

A couple of points.

It's very reasonable to ask how many figures come on a sprue. After all, $5 USD for 100 figures is a bargain, but 10 figures is not! While our production is based around the cost of designing and producing plastic sprues, we know that wargamers think in terms of figures. I know I do!

We haven't made any 10mm figures yet. I'll ask our designer how many figures he believes we can get on a sprue.

The L&U is indeed based on 100 people signing up for 1000 sprues total. We came up with this formula based on the idea that, while everyone (and we asked a lot of wargamers!) has an idea for something they'd like to see in production, we needed to find out what people would actually buy in worthwhile quantities; plastics are expensive to create, and for a small company it's pretty disastrous to go ahead and make something that only a few people will spend their money on.

It's a sort of democracy-in-action thing. people send me ideas and – as long as they aren't tradmark violations or Too Silly to Even Consider ("100 Years of Erroll Flynn!" – what was that idea all about?) I put them forward.

If people want 'em, great. If not, well, no harm done.

Considering the amount of 10mm figures that can fit into a specific area of sprue space, perhaps one should take a look at GWs Battle of Five Armies box, which is one of the few products out there actually containing 10mm plastic figures.

Notice however that the the BoFA sprues are likely to be larger than the 4" x 6" sprues that WF utilises.

Griefbringer