Progress on my Necron Terrain and Finecast Dissapointment

Happy Thanksgiving to those of the American persuasion.  I’ve got a a couple of updates before I head to my in-laws for a few days.

Progress on the Necron Glyphs

I managed to make the first mold of the 3D printed bricks.  It was mostly successful but it had a few flaws.  The blocks came from the printer with a very grainy texture.  I thought about clear coating the blocks to make them smoother, but I was in a hurry so I just made the mold with the masters as is.  The result is the silicon settled into the grainy surface and made the mold very hard to dislodge.  I ended up with a little tear out on the glyphs of the 1.5” long block.

I made a few plaster casts of the mold with hydrostone and now I have a good set of base blocks to start the sand blasting process on.  Unfortunately, I have to head up to my in-laws place in the mountains until Sunday, so sand-blasting will have to wait.

Here’s a few pictures of some of the casts.  Sorry for the poor quality, but the low color contrast of the blocks makes them hard to photograph.

Of Finecast and Dissapointment

Over last weekend I broke down and bought my first Games Workshop Finecast model.  I had been planning to make a plastic cryptek model, but still didn’t have all the bits, so just picked up the GW version.  I know I’m coming to the finecast debate six months or so late, but man was this disappointing.  The local shop had three blisters.  Two had staves with wonky bending.  The third had a pretty straight staff, but you really couldn’t tell much else about the model through the packaging.

Once I got it on the work bench and together the flaws really started to jump out.  There’s a ton of micro air bubbles in inconvenient places.  It’s hard to see, but the worst is on the end of the thumb of the left hand and you can see light coming through the tabard where there’s a bubble in the back.  The foot also had a bigger bubble at the toes, but I managed to hide that with some flock.

None of the flaws are enough that I’d try to return the model, but I certainly won’t be buying any more finecast models unless I can’t convert the model from plastic.  I think I can hide the rest of the flaws with some green stuff, but I really shouldn’t have to.  I’m not a loyalist to any one company and have bought resin figures for years from many different companies.  I can tell you for a fact that resin figures CAN be cast at a higher quality AND a lower price.  But you can’t do that when you have to pay out your profits to shareholders.  The companies that do it better and cheaper do it for the love of what they do while they pay the bills.  Grumble, grumble grumble.

On the plus side though, I've been making good progress with my plastic models.  I’ve got five new immortals ready to finish when I get home and an annihilation barge and squad of Triarch Praetorians about half way painted.