So as Red said, pin vice and drill bit? Or electric mini drill and one of those bits that eat anything (just go slow, to avoid molten plastic). OTOH, I think some people try to manually cut plastic in full, instead of mark and break. All the comments were more like they changed the plastic from something easy (soft PS) to harder (ABS? reinforced with glass ballons or fiber?) because they forgot/wanted to avoid purguing the machine.
You don't want to know how much that would cost... not to mention all the pieces we'd have to have to keep the detail level the same. 20+ pieces per mini!
It seems like every time plastics catch up to CB's metal minis CB finds a way to make the metal better for another 5 years... IMO there's a lot of stuff that could be done in plastic as a hybrid kit or as conversion pieces(though bits arn't in CB's business model) for example the bikes and remotes, but really the best test bed for an infinity model in plastic is the civilian/hvt. A single sprue with a few relatively static poses so it fills the need for a half dozen non combatant models, that arn't faction specific.That way if they're terrible, they're glorified scenery anyway and can be quietly discontinued... The main problem is that a metal casting station is about the size of a large office printer, where plastic needs a full CNC machine to make the molds, and a massive machine to melt and squirt plastic into them. The skills to run those machines have very little overlap with metal casting, which CB is pretty much as good as anyone can be, so they'd risk going from the top of the line to the middle of the road. Also for every one person you've heard say "I'd play infinity if the minis were plastic" there are probably 5 or 6 old farts veterans already playing that prefer metal, so its a risk of losing 5 to gain 1...
Hasn't the CB experimented with plasitc miniatures for Aristeia? ...however the opinions from Infinity players on the results - especially when compared to the metal miniatures of the very same characters set - were, uh.... not favourable. I assume the models production was outsourced in that case, and CB prefers to have their models made entirely in-house.
Yes, the Aristeia! models were outsourced. Said sprue will cost about a year's wages to make (the old Eldar Falcon sprues took 2000 hours for a trained machinist to cut). Every Infinity player would need to buy multiple sprues to make that cost-effective. I'd be hard pressed to buy more than 2 of any given pose. Plastics are good for something that every player needs to buy multiples of. Say, Napoleonic minis, where each army needs several hundred, and a single player would have multiple armies.
Actually, an example close to home: say, miniature bases. We need dozens of them, and they are all absolutely identical, except for different sizes. But even with those different sizes, you need only 3 variants (4, if you're vanilla Haqq). And nobody complains about them looking exactly the same. But, what makes sense for bases, doesn't mean the same for miniatures.
Always pick stuff up by the base, yeah. Also I have to say, I like the vertical edges you get on stuff like Antenociti workshop stuff. Looks nice and sharp.
Sidetracked: I've considered putting a thick piano wire into the base that's exactly as tall as the silhouette is to make it easier to judge LOF and to make for a safer thing to pick models up with. Still haven't got around to it, so no idea how godawful it'll look, but hopefilly I can get the paint table setup, catfree and ready to paint stuff tonight.
Just FYI I’m fairly sure the material of the older and newer bases is the same. The difference between them is the thickness of the plastic over the slot portion is thicker than it should be by about 0.2-.03 mm which is huge since it makes that area much more mechanicaly difficut to cut out. To get round the issue without breaking a tonne of scalpel blades or severing a limb I flip the base over and make lots of shallow cuts in the area defined by the slot until I can pop the plastic through. I suspect the problem is a batch issue as there’s no other difference in the new and old bases apart from the thickness of this small area.
It's still expensive, and the costs have come down a lot less than the average years wage has gone up in the same time but the machines that cut the moulds are a lot more advanced and IIRC the falcon was pretty much at the limit of what they could do back then- actually a few steps past it... It's still a very sketchy prospect for CB, they'd have to either hire new people and buy machines or outsource, and I'll be the first to admit, even if I did know all the costs and CB's resources I couldn't say for sure I'd make that decision sober...
I use the same hobby knife as before, I just carefully score the same line several times. It's definitely a less pleasant experience, though.
Yeah, pretty impressive to consider that was more than 20 years ago and it still looks good. Good to know that the prices have come down, though. Given the steep learning curve with plastic tooling, I'd have to recommend contracting with a company that knows what they're doing already.
Yeah, much like what GW did in the late 80s and through the 90s. GW did metals, they subcontracted the plastics. They didn't make their own plastic figures and vehicles back then, they subcontracted through another company (the company that did the plastic insert pieces for Matchbox(tm) cars did the RTB001s, the rhinos, the land raiders, the plastic fantasy regiments and the imperial army and orks boxes.).
Same thing I've always done, but the bases in the JSA Army Box were awful. Ended up drilling a hole through and then using my clippers to hack the slot out.
Someone encounters problems with the Minis too? The Big Samurai has gapes big as a garage door and the motorbike is slightly not fitting so smooth as it should be. The hole is coverd by the body of the driver-girl. My frind has the same problem, but bend the legs of the samurai, so the gapes are not quite as big, but his bike is more aweful. All other models were perfectly fitting!
I've encountered this issue... I think it was with new Asawira? Not sure. But it's definitely better than it was with making holes off that central slot in older bases. I think it's believable that thickness is what causes this.
