"Got my first Finecast miniature, and ... I liked it!" Topic

My local store had a box of Finecast Dark Elves on the clearance shelf, and after a bit of umming and arring I picked them up.
I was pleasantly surprised. I was expecting bubbles and warped, bendy figures. Instead they were easy to work with, bubble-free and super crisp.
I guess they have worked through the teething troubles with this medium. One halberd was a bit droopy, and warm water didn't seem to fix the problem so I replaced it with a brass shaft, but that was no big deal.
Is GW still releasing Finecast miniatures, or were they just not a great success?
It's probably impossible to discuss them without mentioning the price. That will certainly cause me to pick and choose, but I do intend to get more.
What are others thoughts?

GW seems to be phasing out the material, either by conversion to plastic, or simply slowing new releases. The material was widely unpopular for the reasons you mentioned above. It seems they worked through the issues eventually, but by then it was too late.

Damon.

I got my first box when they released the Wracks for Dark Eldar. The new release of the DE and Finecast was simultaneous.

They were terrible. The weapons sprue was so bad that all but one weapon were unusable.

I had been out of 40K for the most part for about 4 years at that point but really liked the new Dark Eldar models and was ready to get back into it after seeing the Wracks. I bought some of the other stuff but the Wracks and the Finecast finished me off.

I pretty much just put the stuff aside. People told me that GW would replace it but I just couldn't be bothered.

Anyway a year or so later I got a box of the Tolkein dwarfs from a customer to paint and they were fantastic. Well detailed and they weren't fragile at all like metal models are.

Just great little figures.

Since then I've tried a couple of boxes and they are great figures but I don't think you'll see anything new coming out in anything but plastic.

I only have bought some of the regular sized figures from Forge World recently but I hope that they are using the Finecast resin over the older stuff like what they used to make my Tau Barracuda.

That GW is quietly bringing back metal castings of old models tells you most of what you need to know about Finecast.

They dropped that like a hot rock, years ago.

Finecast was not very well received when it first came out. It was thoroughly lambasted over on Frothers.

Good to hear that GW is bringing back metal castings of old models. I always felt that it would be a pity for their old metal LOTR range to go out of production.

I understand that it took them a while to work out the kinks so the later releases were perfectly fine but by then Finecast's reputation was damaged beyond repair.

What happened with Finecast was a terrible shame. Having massively overhyped the product, and inexplicably (though unsurprisingly) hiked the prices on release, GW then ignored the important part and the quality control on the first few batches was so poor it killed any chance it might have had with the community stone dead.

I'm a metal guy out of preference, and while I'll tolerate plastic for bulk purchases I don't like the full-plastic trend that GW went on. But I couldn't (and can't) deny that resin certainly makes the "modelling" part of the hobby a whole lot easier and I was won over by the few Finecast models I did acquire. I hardly ever buy anything from GW now, but I have to say I miss Finecast.

I don't know, I must be in a lucky minority – but from day one I've never had a problem with Finecast, even from the beginning.

I've gotten Finecast for Warhammer characters, for The Hobbit range, and some monster models. I've never seen any of the kinds of problems that people always talk about when they talk about the Finecast disaster that happened with GW.

I know that they had a really bad release early on, but from what I've seen the detail in Finecast is amazing and assembly has never been a problem for me either.

Plus they still have a ton Finecast in their current stocks, in The Hobbit range in particular, plus a whole assortment of older 8th Edition stuff from the older ranges.

I just never had a problem with it whatsoever, and I bought Finecast over what had to be at least a ten year span or more.

I am wondering if this is yet another one of those GW things that gamers and the community blew up into a scandal/disaster of greater proportions than it actually was. I'm not saying there weren't problems with it, and I'm not denying that many people had problems with it. I'm just saying I never saw it, and I do have to wonder if it REALLY was a "disaster" for GW on the magnitude people claim it was.

I would be very suprised if gw go back to metal. I would guess they may be doing it for older figs you have to order, as they may still have the moulds.

It would be nice if they made a devision like specislist games to deal with their older ip. We live in hope.

I think they saw fine cast as a cheap option. I am not sure what they were trying to get away from with the change other than the price of metal.

I know it sealed the fate of the hobbit. Many wouldnt touch it. Having the first print of the first films game with limited ed brown wizard figure still being used as the main box set by the end of the films is proof of that. Anyone else suspect the plastic elf heros were ment to go in a box game? And if thats not enough proof they end up having to give the third films rules away.

Plastic and resin is best as an option. First gw dictate fine cast now plastic. I think the perrys should have bought gw, they appear to know what they are doing.

I read that part of the problem was not the material itself, but that the models were not cast properly because of lack of QA and training.

Warseer: link

Raffa's comment: link

Baranovich, Finecast was only released in, I'm pretty sure, 2011, so ten years is pushing it ;)

But yeah, I had no problems with the Finecast models I got from GW – albeit I didn't get any for a couple of months after it launched. I did have one figure that was a bit dodgy, which I got second-hand. It wasn't a horror show, though, just not as good as it should have been in places, and had it been bought direct from GW I'd have taken it back.

I can absolutely believe that the quality control issues were nowhere near as bad as the community made out, and it was almost certainly blown out of proportion. Even so, given GW's oft-stated claim to make the "best toy soldiers in the world", and the amount of hype Finecast got, that quality control was an issue at all was a major own goal.

I think another part of the problem was that most people who looked past the hype got the impression that GW were replacing metal with something cheaper and charging more for it, and trying to cover this up with bluster about how the new product was superior. GW's price gouging is hardly news but it seemed particularly blatant on that occasion and didn't really help with goodwill.

It's just another sign of the company getting to big and far from its roots. The board hears that resin is cheaper than metal and they decide to scrap metal overnight. Anyone with a brain would have introduced it slowly, or in one range at a time, in case of muck ups. They probably thought gw can do no wrong. They learnt the hard way.

Bones are also a dodgy plastic thing, but at least they are cheap. That's how Reaper got away with them. If gw was a T800 we would be pulling out the keys saying "are we learning yet?"

@The H Man,
that's just completely wrong. GW didn't scrap metal overnight. In fact you can still buy metal models from GW because they stopped converting things TO Finecast. Most of the Lord of the Rings range is still in metal; only a few unit types made it to Finecast, along with a few Finecast-only releases.

Anyways, yeah, most Finecast is slowly being phased out by plastic, anyway. GW doesn't want to cast metal or Finecast, because both materials are now inferior to their precision plastics manufacturing and tooling.

Plastics for the high-volume properties, and now Forge World resin for low-volume properties.

As for my experience I generally dislike the material. I have rather big Esgaroth/Lake-Town armies – both Guards and Survivors- and a huge Gundabad force. Both have tons of Finecast models. Not only are they stupidly expensive, they are not durable for true 28mm scale models like LOTR/Hobbit. It's true there's not a lot of miscasts anymore, but the casting process requires a lot of vents and "supports" for undercuts.

However, I've gotten the recent Hobbit releases from Forge World and their resin is far, far more durable than Finecast, so I'm quite happy with that material switch. It's much much cleaner and sharper than metal.

But blech on Finecast. I'm happy GW is phasing it out.

Judge Doug has it exactly right.

This notion that "the board heard" that something is cheaper than metal and so they "scrap metal overnight". That's just a really bad distortion of the company.

Like their business ethics/prices/community relationship or not, the fact is GW didn't scrap metal overnight. And this didn't just "happen" suddenly in 2011.

For the 80s and early 90s, GW produced metals for its blisters and regimental boxes, but produced plastic miniatures for its Warhammer starter sets. In fact since 4th Edition, which was 1992, GW has used plastics for all its starter sets, up to and including Age of Sigmar starter sets and The Hobbit starter sets.

There's still a ton of metal product in GW's stocks, it didn't just disappear overnight because they began to phase it out.

As Judge Doug said, GW also still has a fairly large amount of Finecast products in its ranges. And this idea that the whole thing just imploded and was this PR disaster is I think overblown. Gamers are still buying the older WH ranges from GW, and a lot of that is in Finecast. The Hobbit ranges have a lot of Finecast.

There is no question that Finecast was very fragile and fiddly to work with. No question that the early runs of it had huge quality control problems.

However, Finecast's detail is excellent, and to some degree you just have to work with it differently than you would plastics or metals. And to be fair to GW, I've seen some pretty brittle and fragile stuff come from a lot of companies. I bought some buildings from Stronghold Terrain, and parts of it were so brittle that they simply shattered into shards during shipment. I had to go in and literally like a puzzle piece back together a front door and front wall of the building that splintered into about twenty pieces. And Stronghold Terrain is a great company and the detail of their stuff is amazing.

Some of Mierce Miniatures stuff is VERY fragile and delicate, and brittle, particularly things like spear shafts, spear points, and sword blades, etc. Mierce's stuff is MEGA-expensive. As in 5-man regimental sets go for around $80 USD and up in some cases, and a lot of it can EASILY break, even under the most careful of circumstances.

My point is that this isn't all a GW thing, it's also a resin thing in general. It's not a material that's well suited for gaming and for being banged around, that's for sure. It's more suited for display and dioramas. Buildings in resin are more durable, simply because buildings don't tend to have all the spindly, thin little spiky things like weapons and banner poles like miniatures do.

As I said in my earlier post, I've personally never had a problem with Finecast. Great detail, and I never saw any of the casting or bubbling issues in anything I bought. I guess I simply got used to working with it. I'm not saying that everybody should accept it, but only that this isn't just a GW issue.

@Deuce3,

Wow, I checked. You are absolutely right! That's weird, it felt like it had been around a lot longer than that. I had something stuck in my memory that GW had Finecast stuff in like 2007. I must have been mistaken. The years are blurring together!

So that would mean that about five years would be the span I bought it, not ten.

I have to say, sometimes the gaming community reflects more of our modern culture's tendency to want everything perfect and everything right now kind of impatience that tends to drive our daily lives. I really feel that Finecast is one of those things that reflects this.

I was just looking at several gaming forums from 2011. While some of the complaints about the early batches of Finecast are quite justified, and the quality control issues were pretty horrible – the substance of the rest of the complaints really break down under the weight of their hypocrisy.

Much of the other complaints consist of things that are absolutely not unique to GW! First off, the pricing. Rage, rage, rage over GW's pricing. I would invite people to go and look at the prices of resins from companies like Fenryl or Mierce, or SCIBOR for God's sake! and then come back and compare pricing to GW.

Second thing, one of the forums' chief complaints was that the second batch of Citadel Finecast had a chemical(mold release agent) all over the miniatures, and that paint would not stick to it. And of course, mold release agent helps a miniature to come out of its mold cleaner and with less flash. This was a HUGE complaint. So now that GW had cleaner cast releases and less flash, the new whine was that paint didn't stick to them! Ummm……isn't one of the most basic instructions that you find on practically EVERY vendor site that sells resin is that you have to WASH resin parts in soap and water first, to remove the release agent? Wash them before you prime and paint? Same with metal miniatures. I've known that since the 1990s. Washing resin before assembling and painting has been a basic part of preparation for at least the past 20 years.

So for gamers who apparently had never heard of washing resin before painting, also turned personal laziness around and blamed GW for using mold release agent. Get real.

So even THAT was turned into a "GW failure". I mean seriously, there's a difference between a legitimate complaint by customers and outright white-wash bashing of a company no matter what they do.

Another huge complaint was that Finecast was so much harder to clean and trim because it was soft and was too difficult to get out of tight spaces and crevices. However, other forums reported that they found Finecast to actually be EASIER to clean than metal. The reason for this, and I found this to be true as well, is that you can get most of resin flash out of those spaces with the brush technique, going around in a circular motion. You can trim flash lines down close with a hobby knife, and then finish with the brush. That avoids creating cutting lines on the miniature's surface with the hobby knife.

As I said, I agree with this. I found Finecast to clean up faster and easier than metals by far. Metals take way longer because you have to go in with your knife and pry out and clip away all the little vent lines, etc.

So again, general complaining sometimes has more to do with band-wagon negativity towards a company more than anything.

Anybody who is a modeler who has worked on military/historical resin models or fantasy models will tell you that resins in general can have one of all of these issues, and that you have to learn how to prepare it and how to work with it. What the forums from 2011 show me is more a reflection of ignorance and impatience leading to company bashing than it does actual complaints of substance.

In regards to phasing out metal over night or at all, I was talking about the stores more than the website. I know some older stuff is available online or by ordering, I did not realize metal was included. Again, that is older stuff though which may, or may not be, while stocks last.

I do think it was definitely a silly board decision not to do fine cast bit by bit. It was a massive shock to the system, to the customers and store workers alike. Talk of filling holes with super glue or staff fixing peoples problem casts. Liquid green stuff. A slower release schedule could have avoided the unfortunate problems.

Again, with reaper bones you can buy either metal or bones. Other companies also offer metal or resin options, so a slow move to finecast was possible, just not taken. It seemed to take only weeks to me, but may have taken months, yet should have taken a year or two at least, if done properly. Oh well, its all academic now.

As for the washing of the figures. At these prices and from such a big company, you would think they could be pre-washed. If they can do it to potatoes…