I'm posting this as part of my ongoing series of posts chronicling my re-entry into the world of vintage Warhammer games. I am currently building several Warhammer armies, and decided to start with the dwarves.
Most of the dwarves I bought I got new, from a retail shop back in 2012, and also some additional stuff online from Ebay. Nearly everything I got was new still in the wrap.
The vast majority of the dwarves are 8th Edition, with some older 6 and 7th editions kits mixed in as well.
Nearly everything is plastic, with the exception of a vintage Organ gun which is a combination of metal and plastic, and several character models which are metal. There are also a few 8th Edition individual character models made of Citadel Finecast.
Despite all of the scandal and quality control disaster of GW's initial attempt at resin miniatures (Finecast), I personally had never run into any problems with Finecast. I own a bunch of Finecast from The Hobbit movie range, and it was all perfectly fine. I also had a couple larger monster cav. models in Finecast, also no problems.
However, in building my dwarf army, I discovered that the Grudge Thrower catapult I bought was a Finecast model. I a had assumed the whole time it was wrapped in the package that is was metal and plastic.
I have to say this model helped me to understand why Finecast was so roundly rejected and generally despised by the gaming community when it was introduced back in 2011.
The crew models themselves were not a problem, detail was crips and there were no bubbles or flaws or casting problems of any kind. However, the flash was pretty heavy, and at certain points it was difficult to remove flash without also digging into some of the detail of the actual model:
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But overall the cleanup on these was pretty easy, the casts were mostly clean and the flash was fairly easy to remove.
HOWEVER, the catapult itself was HORRIFIC. Several parts that were supposed to be straight wooden timbers had permanent warping bends in them, and a rope component was so brittle that it broke while trying to assemble it. Several of the components didn't match up to the holes they were supposed to fit into. This model fought me at every step. I had to carve out some extra room where the catapult arm fitted into the body of the machine because the way it was cast the arm was forced to be crooked. A bubble in one of the gear wheels had completely eradicated the teeth of the gear, leaving this blob area where the teeth should have been.
The flash on the catapult parts was INSANE. It took me nearly a half-hour to properly clean it all off.
This was not fun to build, and I had to babysit every component to prevent breakage and to adjust the assembly.
From the pictures you see here, it doesn't appear to be all that bad. From tabletop height it will be just fine. But upon closer inspection you would see how bad this Finecast model is:
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There is no way I would ever have paid full retail for this ($40.00) if I had known the casting was this bad.
Any way, just wanted to post this because I now have a new appreciation for just how bad Citadel Finecast was when it was first introduced. Plus the whole nonsense of GW SELLING a repair kit for Finecast, to fix a product that they screwed up. That really left a bad taste in my mouth.
As ever, GW's miniatures remain among my favorite fantasy miniatures, I still love their plastics and vintage metals and still use GW as the primary source of my fantasy armies.
But THIS model was not worth what it cost. I now better understand how bad Finecast really was.