[OT] Historicals and flash (was:Re: Ships)

>On Thu, 27 Apr 2000 23:10:31 -0400, "Laserlight"
<laserlight@quixnet.net>
>wrote:
>
>>I get all psyched up and ready for a good session of filing
>>and carving, and bam, it's time for the glue and primer almost
>>before I have a chance to sit down.  At this rate, I'm going to
>>be forced to actually paint these things.
>> I hope you feel appropriately guilty.
>
>He does a similarly poor job of flash creation on the SG2 stuff, too.
It's
>gotten to the point that when I work on historicals, I have completely
eroded
>my flash removal skills. And it's all HIS fault.

While I appreciate the tongue-firmly-in-cheek tone of these posts (and
am
very flattered by the comments!), your comparison between the
historicals
and SF&F markets is actually an interesting point. In those few scant
moments that may laughably be described as "free time", I've recently
I've
been dabbling around in a bit of hysterical (sorry, I mean historical)
stuff again in a desperate effort to actually do a bit of social gaming
(rather than eat, sleep and breathe SF/GZG). To this end I've been
buying
some stuff from Foundry (Old West, ACW and Darkest Africa) and Skytrex
(15mm Western Desert WW11). Now, the Skytrex Command Decision 15mm
vehicles
are lovely, but their infantry packs, while nice figures, are COVERED in
flash - on many that I have the area of flash is bigger than the
figure!!
Cleaning this off a 15mm infantryman is a long, slow job. Even the
Foundry
figures, which everyone raves about as being wonderful (and the ARE very
good figures) have a certain amount of flash and are also very heavily
covered in the little threads of metal caused by flow down the air
escape
channels in the mould, making the  cleanup time for each figure
considerable.
It made me think that the SF&F market is really quite spoilt - we expect
clean, flash-free figures to a degree almost unheard of to the
historical
gamer. Flash is a fact of life with metal casting, and gets worse with
(a)
the age of the mould and (b) how hard you run the mould in a casting
session. While I do my best to keep it to a minimum on our own stuff,
some
of our moulds for the older figures and ships are getting to the point
where a bit of flash is unavoidable - but when they get so worn that
there
is more flash than figure then it really is time to make a new mould!
I don't really know what all this rambling is about, just some
disconnected
thoughts...... ;-)

Jon (GZG)
>
>
>Allan Goodall			agoodall@interlog.com
>Goodall's Grotto: http://www.interlog.com/~agoodall/
>
>"Surprisingly, when you throw two naked women with sex
>toys into a living room full of drunken men, things
>always go bad." - Kyle Baker, "You Are Here"