Resin: Flames of War style

For most of us in the miniatures gaming world resin is that exotic material just shy of Vibranium.   We work in gray plastics and shiny white metals.  Those nuts who buy ForgeWorld talk of soaking and rinsing, mold release, air bubbles and mix ratios.  Well, if you have ever seen the shiny gray tanks in those Flames of War blisters hanging on the wall, you have seen resin.  This article chronicles my experience with the Flames of War: Open Fire! starter set models (so far just the StuG G's, I'll update when when I do the M4A1's).

Any time you deal with resin it will start something like this:

That green stuff is Simple Green. Other times it gets soaked in warm soapy water.  The soap part being run of the mill liquid dish detergent, I think I use Dawn.  Like all resin, Flames of War stuff is sometimes shiny to the point of being unprimable.  When car primer wont stick, you know something is up.  This batch got soaked in both.

Resin is brittle!!! Mild agitation (I swirled it gently in the spaghetti jar) can lead to breakage as shown.

Luckily, resin is highly porous.  Because resin is a two part mix, even if it is smooth to our eyes, resin is actually very rough at the micro scale as the are tones of air bubbles and fine cracks as teh two luquids combine.  This means it takes very well to super glue as shown below.

As you can see, that chipped off piece of schurzen glued right back on there.  If only I have found the third little piece and fitted the puzzle back together again.  As a side note, when you superglue resin, the reinforced with superglue resin is stronger than the normal resin.  This can lead to uneven filing and sanding if you are not aware of that.

You will notice that StuG in the start set is two pieces: a resin body and a pewter gun.  Because of this, the underside is not only filled in with resin, but is channeled and cut in such a way as the model floats above its tracks.  Those Germans were advanced, but not so fast Adolf!

That is a lot of resin to file out.  Resin is toxic and spews dust every where.  It is cold and rainy outside.  Therefore I will cut my resin inside.  And therefore create a fine layer of toxic dust all over my basement?  No way.  Enter the Dremel and vice.   Below you can see how I mounted a vice with balsa wood jaw guards and scotch tape.  This allows a rather firm grip on the solid body of the model.  You'll want a solid grip for this next part.  Notice the white plastic bag to catch the dust.  That is key, otherwise you just making a bigger mess than filing it down by hand.

If you zoom in, you can see where I carefully cut a nice channel out next to the tracks.  The goal was the cut a series of these channels and then chisel out the remaining fins like so....

Instead, I was having so much fun, I decided to just grind that whole puppy down. (the picture is an intermediate step)

The key is , because of carefully Dremel usage, the vast majority of the dust ended up in that garbage bag, and not on the floor or floating around int eh air as it would have if I had taken a file to it from the beginning.

Safety First!  Despite having the dust going where I wanted safety is essential.  That dust is nasty, and Dremel bits are know to come flying off, as are chunks of resin.  Goggles and a dust mask are important.

A little green stuff to repair my over zealous nature with power tools, and voila!

Weekely Goal 10/24/2009

The goal this week was to strip, prime, base coat and do the ambush camouflage airbrushing on 5 Panzer IV Ausf. H medium tanks and 2 StuG G assault guns.  The panzers had been siting around for almost a year, and the StuG G's came in the Open Fire! starter set for Flames of War.  By Wednesday night, here is where I stood:

Thursday night I buckled down and did both passes of camouflage as shown below:

For the time being, they will stay like this, perhaps every now and again when I need a break, I'll do some work on the tracks or pick out the tools.  The track and tools are next, followed by the decals.,  the GW brown washes, and varnshing, then on to weathering.  In the meantime however Christmas is fast approaching and I still owe Ron a Painter v. Painter model.

Review: Malifaux First Impressions

I have been watching Wyrd miniatures for a while now, making sure to look over my shoulder ever now again to see if anything new cropped up (much like I treat Freebooter and Dark Sword).  A few weeks before Thanksgiving I had the chance to play a few learning games (I have multiple rules sets that I have never played, er... umm..., Flames of War).  So the following impression is based on play, although not full fledged skirmishes with all the bells and whistles.

The rulebook:
Malifaux rulebook is in many ways very similar to Privateer Press rulebooks- a running story across factions, great illustration, rules that make sense on the surface and everything you need in one book. 

As you don't use dice, there are a lot of easy to read two row tables to show what the various totals for cards mean.  One of the things that I didn't even catch until I sat down to write this review was, not once in the rule section, was there a figure for model positioning.  Unlike GW and PP games where you are constantly shown diagrams for charge lanes, line of sight, cover, etc, Malifaux means everything off the base and height values so those drawings are not needed.  Can this model? (Answer: I dunno, can you draw an uninterrupted line?).  There has been substantial errata posted on the website forum, and this appears updated routinely.  Most of the rule errors are simply grammatical.  The faction/model errata is where the significant changes occur.  Some of them I caught reading the book the first time, for instance, why was the generic Guild Guard a Unique member of the Family.  I wager in two years we'll get the Infinity treatment, and get a really polished near perfect revised rulebook.

The actual production value of the book--written and illustration, and even layout-- is very nice.  The fiction starts with nice overviews of the grim Victorian characters showing primary role.  When it concludes, you feel as if you get just enough to realize how open and desperate the world of Malifaux is.  Very little has purely good, and near everything has the taint of either evil or malice.  From the simple line drawings to the full color chatper pages, the art is of premium grade. 

The missions are highly varied, and the system even allows for secret objectives.  One of the things I am always interested in are asymmetrical object based scenarios.  Malifaux has a random primary objective (a strategy) and optionally, secretly chose secondary objectives (schemes) at the your own, not the game's, discretion.  So you might very well in up with defend an objective with one crew and kill their leader on the other. Further terrain features heavily into most objectives.

The models:
They have a strange Weird West- Steampunk- Victoriana flavor.  And it works.  Models are 28-32mm, but not heroic.  No elven archer hands here.  Some of the earlier models in the range are nasty to put together, having very fine chains or wrist joints.  New models are often single piece, or hidden joins.  In quality, they are comparable to Infinity in so many ways, including assembly.Recently, more single piece models have shown up, and they are very well done.  A little twisting of an arm with padded pliers, and you can completely remove the flat effect which single piece models often suffer from.

The game play:
I have only had a few games, mostly just moving Lady Justice around for a charge on Saemus.  The game does play fast.  There is a resource allocation system, soulstones, similiar to Warchmachines focus mechanic, with major exception-- you only get an initial alotment, they don't come back every turn.

The game a feel similar to low model count Warmachine.  Flip cards, add, compare.  The twist and cheat (which are the actual game terms for it), is swapping cards from your hand to with those in play, or using a soulstone to add an additional card.  Additionally, all weapons have ranges, even melee weapons.  So the base to base contact isn't as crazy as in some games and the rue melee monsters, have much longer melee ranges.   Damage actually scales based on a damage flip, with no damage always being a nasty 1/54 chance (flipping is the card equivalent to a dice roll).

So that is my quick first impression of Malifaux.  As I get more time to play more meaningful games and paint up some models, I'll be sure to come back for a more informed impression.