Finecast, your thoughts?

Kuanor · Post by **Kuanor** » Sat Jun 04, 2011 12:06 am

You can, of course, but it’s at least as annoying as with plastic since you cannot just drown it in acetone as you probably do with metal, and in addition you you have to be careful with the toothbrush or whatever you clean them with because the resin is that soft.

I suspect that shutting down private trade with used easy-to-restore metal figures was one of the main reasons for the change. Each £€$ spent on ebay is one not spent in a GW (unless the seller is starting a new army immediately).

Deroth · Post by **Deroth** » Sat Jun 04, 2011 1:17 am

Heldrak wrote:
Deroth wrote:I reckon the ease of cleaning up and putting the model together has to be worth something, not 20% but still something.

Ease of assembly is a valuable commodity, but I am not convinced that a Finecast model is easier to assemble than a metal model. Anything that's cast in a two-part mould is going to have mould lines, metal or resin. Anything that has fragile small connections that will be subjected to the rigors of gaming will need to be pinned.

While I agree that for smaller models there will not necessarily be a huge difference to assembly but the same certainly can not be said for the larger models of the finecast range. The larger models go together quite nicely without pinning and seem to have good strong connections despite this fact. You can still pin them if you want but I dont think I will be, time will tell.

Savonarola · Post by **Savonarola** » Sat Jun 04, 2011 7:46 am

I do not believe that filing resin (of any kind) for modelling purposes would represent considerable threat to health.

If you stuff the unset hardener inside your eye, it MAY cause irritation. The safety warning is there for legal purpose and applies mainly in production plants where there is lots of the chemicals evaporated, or those where the resin is sandpapered and filed in huge quantities. But a couple of mold lines? Theoretically any amount of the mattter in any form may cause an allergy, super theoretically two mollecules exposed at different times may provoque the asthma. But realistically, I believe (in modelling!) the cyanoacrylate (superglue) is ways more dangerous and nobody cares. Or inhalation of the spray chemicals. BTW, the metal dust from metal minis is toxic as well.

It is hard to establish the real threat just reading the legal bulls*it information. On the other hand, nobody wants to risk a serious threat. Is there anybody with REAL experience in getting health issues supposedly by exposition during modelling? Yes, I know there are people with serious issues after working for 30 yrs in a chemical plant but that is a different thing. Do you know how much of asbeste fibers you inhale each time you drive a 100 km on an average highway? Lets get realistic.

The heat lability (bigger than in metal or even plastic) of the resin seems to be the biggest problem for me. Leavinig the mini in a locked car for a couple of hours leads to distortion of the shape. Such distortion may potentially be corrected but the paintjob will probably be in vain. The bubbles present in the mini are a natural problem in resin casting and should have been catched during the QC check. Definitely, we should thoroughly observe the mini (of any kind) before the buy and such flaw should be a subject of automatic replacement anyway.

faeli-n · Post by **faeli-n** » Sat Jun 04, 2011 8:27 am

This is what's so frustrating: why post that it's difficult to strip them of paint when all it is is 'just as difficult as plastic'.

No wonder half the people on WH forums don't know what to think when people just post random bits of information with no basis in actual fact!

Kuanor · Post by **Kuanor** » Sat Jun 04, 2011 12:28 pm

Plastic is difficult to strip from paint, and resin is even more due to low stablity. I don’t remember posting something wrong in this case.

Thetosh · Post by **Thetosh** » Sat Jun 04, 2011 3:27 pm

I think FaeLi-N's comment is more 'unless you've tried stripping paint from finecast minis, how can you say it's going to be difficult/easy?' I was always told that stripping paint from plastics was hard. 1 day submerged in Fairy Power Spray however and the paint pretty much washed off.

Kuanor · Post by **Kuanor** » Sat Jun 04, 2011 4:15 pm

It is enough to know how the resin reacts with the chemicals I usually use to strip paint, and therefore I don’t need to paint a mini, wait a year and try it then. Some sprue pieces I have laying before me on the desk are enough.

At the end, already with plastic it depends on how the thing was painted: If it wasn’t basecoated, you probably can strip the colour in pieces after it has lain in spirit for some hours. But if it was?
I don’t want to rely on the ebay seller to be stupid enough to forget basecoating his minis.

Thetosh · Post by **Thetosh** » Sat Jun 04, 2011 5:28 pm

Sorry I'm a little confused by your reply. Are you saying that it'll be easier to strip a mini if it's been undercoated or easier if it hasn't?

Thetosh · Post by **Thetosh** » Sat Jun 04, 2011 5:50 pm

Incidentally, do you know -exactly- how GW's 'secret formula resin' reacts with the chemicals you use?

Kuanor · Post by **Kuanor** » Sat Jun 04, 2011 5:50 pm

Easier if it hasn’t. At least I guess that the ones behaving like described above did so because of not being undercoated.

How it reacts: Well, it is sufficient to throw a piece of GW FC resin into the stuff, isn’t it?

Thetosh · Post by **Thetosh** » Sat Jun 04, 2011 8:31 pm

All the models I stripped in fairy power spray were undercoated, and interestingly the stuff stripped all the GW paint, but not the undercoat, so I was left with some very nice undercoated minis.

Kuanor · Post by **Kuanor** » Sun Jun 05, 2011 9:40 am

Are you sure the undercoated surface was clean before being painted (and striped later)?

Normally it should not happen.

(Edit: Hihi, my 200th post, I’m a CoK now. ^^)

Thetosh · Post by **Thetosh** » Sun Jun 05, 2011 12:30 pm

No idea if the undercoated surface was cleaned before being stripped, the batch lot came from a friend who had a huge falling out with his local GW and had no-one near him to play with so he gave me the load.

Timewise he reckons he'd had them painted for about a year before he gave them to me, and i'm the one that stripped them.

Kuanor · Post by **Kuanor** » Sun Jun 05, 2011 12:48 pm

OK,… afaik if there is a long time between the mini being sprayed and panted, or even if you use it in games in the meantime (not in this case, I guess), the colour doesn’t stick that well. If you could strip it with a substance for removing fat from surfaces, it supports my guess.
But this is only a suggestion for an explanation what could have happened.

The point is that normally plastic is not that easy to strip, and you say by yourself, that you heard it often before. It’s true.

Crawd · Post by **Crawd** » Tue Jun 07, 2011 12:46 pm

(it's been ages since I have posted on this forum, geez)

I've been reading about these "Finecast" lately and seems like they lack some heat resistance compared to plastic or metal.

http://thefrontlinegamer.blogspot.com/2 ... n-sun.html

http://warhammer.org.uk/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=88091

If it's really a problem... I just wonder why don't they just stick to plastic...

Post by **Dyvim tvar** » Tue Jun 07, 2011 1:18 pm

thetosh wrote:All the models I stripped in fairy power spray were undercoated, and interestingly the stuff stripped all the GW paint, but not the undercoat, so I was left with some very nice undercoated minis.

There are types of paint designed to actually form a bond with plastic. If they were plastic minis you stripped, an undercoat of this type would not have come off.