Reviving this to see if anybody has had trouble with any of the Hobbit Finecast minis. I have Fimbul, Azog, Bolg and Thranduil and all of them are perfect.

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This ^^ apart from one small bubble on yaznegs warg which you cant see now it is painted. I picked up both elf captains blisters and they were perfect aswell.

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12th GBHL 2013.
13th GBHL 2014
9th GBHL 2015


Mid Sussex Wargamers

I broke my no fine cast rule for Bolg, in case he disappears- I think it's a great sculpt.

It was mostly ok. An hours worth of flash to carefully remove. If you don't mind mould lines you could just break it away in 5 mins I suppose. After an hour I still don't think I've done a perfect job, but didn't want to risk wrecking the model completely. I consider myself at an intermediate skill level modeller. God help my 13 year old self expected to complete the same job.

There were a few minor details missing, such as the little bone spikes tied to the haft of his club, and a few air bubbles. There were also a few rough areas which needed to be carefully cut flush on the flat surfaces of the club. The inside of the "bear paws" which make up his shoulder pads were very rough and flaky and needed quite a lot of careful scraping. I managed to break off one of the bear claws while doing this, but have salvaged it.

The club is a separate piece which fits on to the wrists of the model. The fit was pretty dreadful, and required a fair amount of fiddling with hot water to get the club straight, and even then the gaps were large and required more than just a "seam" of GS.

I was operating in the hope that the models made specifically for fine cast were better than the re-mastered versions of existing sculpts. To an extent i think this is true. Nothing like as bad as some of the [word deleted] they supplied me with when it first came out, but my opinion hasn't changed. It is still a sub-standard product for a very high price.

I truly wish they'd move the lot over to plastic. I do baulk at paying £15 for a plastic character model, but at least it'd be fit for purpose. An hour or more of cleaning (and still not a perfect model after it) is unreasonable at anything other than a bargain basement price.

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Azog on foot had a few small air bubbles, but liquid greenstuff fixed it. The warg is still unassembled, slightly misfitting and one set of teeth are hollowed out from airbubbles, but I can fix it. Lindir had no problems. I've a Thranduil with a severe lack of a nose, which I'm returning, although it's fair to say the rest of it is perfect.

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How on earth does a missing nose get past quality control!?!?

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My Thranduil was perfect, not a single bubble! Radagast on foot was the same! And mould lines are very easy to remove on finecast...a lot easier then on metal! I use very small-grain sandpaper and a brandnew x-acto blade!

But still, folks, given what the price is, surely we should not have to spend so much time dealing with bubbles, missing elements, warping and hours of cleanup on an individual mini? That is what puts me off FC. High cost, unreliable quality.

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The thing is, plastic isn't necessary better, at least for heroes. Tauriel costs 20€ here in France which imo is a lot! Yesterday I inspected the sprue and even though there are no defects the quality is not what youmight expect for 20 bucks. Here I would really have preferred a 15€ finecast version. But I agree with you Dorthonion that for the price we are paying for finecast there shouldn't be any defects. What I think is a real insult to the hobbyists, is that this new material has been tested on the market insted of real testing before releasing it. All the people who bought the first finecast products really were guinea pigs for GW and even paid money for it. Now most of the issues seem to be solved but nonetheless this should have been done before releasing a new material on the market.

I'm not sure a missing nose means "most of the issues are fixed" if you can't open the blister right there in the store as opposed to getting it shipped to you its still a Devlan Mud shoot as to weather you'll get a usable model or not. And with the current prices I can't see why someone would take that risk.

How come you lot have so many FC problems when I have only had 3, out of quite a few FC models?

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"I am the Flying Spagetti Monster. Thou shall have no other monsters before me"
-FSM.

That is a good question. The Barrels out of Bond FC models are the first I have purchased that were near perfect cast. One thing I think they were obviously designed to be spun-cast in resin not metal. They have huge tabs and giant air vents. So GW has gotten some of the design quality control problems under control.
All of the fine cast models I purchased up to this point were absolute trash. GW will have to way more to convince me that a good batch is not a fluke.
Just because I got lucky once is not going to change my mind.

You only had 3 problems in the short time FC has been available.Compare that to never had a problem with GW metal in over 20 years. I have made only one satisfactory Fine Cast purchase ever. I won't make many more if any. If they were all perfect cast FC resin would still be the worst material in use industry wide. I am glad you have been lucky.

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"the same as a duck you must be made of wood"

In fairness, some people are just pickier than others. I guess to a lot of people my Bolg (gundabad orc general) was perfect. The missing details were minor. I noticed them, but perhaps many others wouldn't.

I also think, as OMW pointed out- if you've been in the hobby for a lot longer than fine cast has been around (or if you buy from any of the very high quality "boutique" producers out there, or just Forgeworld), you might contrast the close to zero problem rate in metal with the high problem rate in fine cast, and just look all that more carefully in anticipation of problems. I am quite literally doing that. When I look at a fine cast model I'm not trying to work out if there's a problem or not. I'm presuming there is one, and look till I find it. I never had that level of scrutiny with metal, but then again, I guess when painting a model you really see all the bells and whistles, so if there had been one I'd have seen it eventually.

I think another contributing factor is when your purchases were made, and the nature of those purchases. I bought a bunch of fine cast on release because I wanted to see what this great new material was all about.
I do think since then they've managed to get a slightly better process going.

I was also buying a lot of "remastered" figures from the old ranges. These were not designed for the material, and I can only presume they were remastered in such a way which didn't have much sensitivity to the material. I don't know if GW just used the same old metal moulds with the new material, or if they really made new moulds for the figures (as they said they had), but either way, the quality of "made for fine cast" figures does seem to be more reliable.

I've also noticed that finecast seems better for large and voluminous shapes, and very poor at thin, spindly or pointy models. Most of the problems I've had have been on models with protruding detail.

However, it's still a highly inferior product. No other producer I've seen casts with a worse material than this. It really is poor, and it's a tragedy to have so many beautiful sculpts available only in this Devlan Mud. Buy a model from Studio McVey, Figone or Enigma and you can see what sort of quality (amazing, far superior to metal) quality is possible in resin. Those companies make the product GW promised us. Sadly though, while it's easy for a Warhammer player to proxy something of similar style and scale, we are married to a less popular aesthetic, not to mention the licensing issues involved in copying a Weta design.

As a sidenote, quite a few of the top commission painters have now put a ban on finecast- they won't take orders in that material because it takes far too long to make perfect, and doesn't paint as well.

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Just had to exchange Azog, the Warg was missing his teath and a paw. They gave me a new one and got to keep the old one! I was vet pleased

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Harfoots-The first of the Hobbit people to cross over the Misty Mountains and enter Eriador.