Finecast Casting Fail....

I'd been warned by a friend and subsequent reading of various websites that an early batch of Citadel's Finecast range had been found to have "significant" casting "errors." As the finecast figures I'd purchased to date had been perfectly fine, better than Forgeworld in most cases, I thought I'd dodged that particular bullet.

Then I started prepping Castellan Crowe for paintclub this weekend.

I confess he looked fine at an initial glance, but as I started beavering away cleaning up mould lines and what not it became clear that all was not well. Now I'm not talking massive failings in casting here, as the above picture shows, the problem errors are extremely localised and not covering the entire figure.

But they are problems.

Sometimes when casting resin you get pockets of air trapped (try casting your own resin some time, it's easy enough, and you'll see what I mean) and if the bubbles are near the surface they crack and you get a little crater. In some cases you can work around this, either by filing it down or taking advantage of it and turning it into instant battle damage!

Not possible in this case. I found multiple bubbles in the bolter casing, the ammo clip, hands and arms of the figure. The position of the bubbles meant filing down wasn't possible and bullet holes would've looked stupid. The only solution was to get to work with my green stuff.

I'm not accomplished with greenstuff but, I am getting better the more I practice. Basically I had to use the green stuff to rebuild the parts of the armour and backpack so they didn't look like the inside of an Aero chocolate bar. Because the photos are extreme closeup the greenstuff looks a little scruffy, but once they were undercoated with chaos black spraypaint, they're barely noticeable.

The point of this post is that if you do find yourself in possession of a defective Finecast or Forgeworld miniature, you don't have to take it back to the shop unless you really want to (especially if the shop is some 25miles away as in my case). Of course if you do want to exercise your statutory rights as a consumer you should and if the staff in your local GW won't exchange your Finecast model for something at the standard you'd expect, play merry hell with them. I do accept that there will be some casting errors that need correcting when you get a miniature out of the box, we've been doing that we metal figures for years. Cleaning up mould lines and flash is part of the fun. But you shouldn't have to perform reconstructive surgery on a figure unless you want to and feel capable of doing so.

If you, it is not hard to do and good practice in using green stuff. But, if you don't want to, take it back to the shop and make sure they give you a suitable replacement.

So far with Forgeworld I've not had a figure that's needed as much doing to it as this unfortunate Finecast Castellan Crowe. Which is fortunate, because I've no idea what their returns policy is.