Re: How to put a Tegethoff dreadnought together?

>Doug Evans wrote:
>>  Short answer: both. There were a wide variety in quality with the
Geohex
>>  sets; many were dreadful. Jon's, by my small sample and many
reports, are
>>  much more consistant, and on the good side at that. Also, I think KR
worked
>>  with several casting companies over the course of his license. I've
heard
>>  AoG had a similar story with it's first B5 stuff.
>
>Okidoki, that's it then. I also have some Japanese and UNSC ships I
>bought directly from Jon, and there is almost no flash at all on these
>ships. The NSL ships are older of course, but at least this gives me
>hope of buying some nice versions of NSL ships at Salute.

We fairly recently replaced the moulds on most of the NSL line, 
especially the big ships, because the old ones were getting tired; 
continued runs of large chunks of metal can knock hell out of the 
moulds!

I know there were problems with some of the stuff GeoHex produced 
under licence - sadly I didn't have much knowledge or control over 
this while it was happening! Unfortunately this isn't good for our 
reputation, which (coupled with the fact that I never made a great 
deal of money out of the licensing deal...) has a lot to do with why 
we haven't appointed another licencee after GeoHex went belly-up, 
preferring to supply direct from here where I KNOW what is going out 
to the customers.... this of course neatly draws this back onto the 
topic being discussed on the list a few days ago!  ;-)

One thing that has struck me recently, however, is that the F&SF side 
of the hobby is really quite "spoilt" in the typical quality of 
castings supplied by most companies in the field - I've recently been 
buying a lot of 15mm WW2 stuff for my own hobby interest, and 
(without naming company names, but I've bought from most of them) in 
many cases the quality of the castings is WAY, WAY lower than ANY SF 
gamer would accept.... significant numbers of miscasts, broken 
pieces, missing pieces, wrongly-packed pieces, whole models requiring 
massive surgery and reworking to get them assembled, etc, etc... 
including some that are just simply so poor that  the whole model has 
been consigned to the bits bin!

I'm not saying for a minute that this is the way it should be - just 
that overall, the F&SF side seems to have significantly better 
quality control than much of the historical side of the industry.....

Jon (GZG)

>
>Frits
>
>--
>Frits Kuijlman 		    F.Kuijlman@{its,cs,twi}.tudelft.nl
>Delft University of Technology 		       The Netherlands
>The next Murphy Mania will be in Spring 2005, and not in Autumn 2004.