Thursday, February 7, 2013

Pre-fab building woes

  OK, I glued together some of the new sprues and slapped them with a little paint. I left the roof loose so it can be lifted off to see inside.

  It makes a neat little sci-fi shack. I have some concerns, like I always do.  ( I got a bad feeling about this drop!)

 The rivets are not exactly the same size. This irritates me quite a bit but it took me some time to notice. I showed a friend and he spent a lot of time looking for an error and could not find it without me telling him.  It makes me want to start over, but then again it is not that bad and I got a lot of other things to make. I am going to let it go and if I get a lot of complaints I will have to find time to re-make the entire one mold just to make a rivet .002" smaller.  Damn the littlest problems can cause the strangest headaches. If you buy one be warned.

  But on the other hand, there is some neat stuff in here.
 
 
This is the outside. Corrugated metal with rivets. There is a roof sprue, a plain wall sprue, and a door/window sprue. There is also a "molding" sprue to fill in the corners. It has a solar panel and vent fan on it also. 
 
 
This is the inside. Plainer walls. You can reverse it if you want.
 
It is possible to glue a couple together and make a larger structure. It is not battle damaged but you could take a nippers to it and hack it up if you wanted to. I plan on doing that to mine. The doors and window are pretty thin and can be cut out for open doors.
 
  I am currently in the throes of fighting the mightiest virus ever to plague mankind. As soon as I stop being toxic I plan on getting some of these out to a friend for some proper painting and will post better pics then.
 
  There are definitely a few of these going out on my next city battle field. Some simple dwellings for the commoners.
 
 


  Here is an AT-43 trooper for size comparison.   I am going to have little fun with these for sure.

  Not sure what will pop up next. I got 2 more widgets to make and I am working with a few folks to make some other terrain stuff.

  But, the real issue is that I have to cross the hurdle and make minis. So far I keep playing it safe with nice and simple stuff. But what I really want to make is lots of plastic figures at a reasonable price for people like me. While this building took 4 double sided molds to make a small model, I could be producing 4 28mm figures per sprue. The press is perfect for figures, and I keep avoiding it because of the enormous complexity involved.
  The problem with figures is it take so many hours to design and program the CNC machine. There are so many steps. One error in any step and you have rivets that are the wrong size. With a ramshackle building it makes little difference. With a model figure it might make the entire mold worthless.

  After these couple of widgets I am going to begin having another go at some plastic figures. I will try and refrain from profanity laced posts when things go wrong, but I might show a render or 2 and a pic of a block of metal becoming a mold.

 I am in a race against kick starter. I think this is going to be interesting.

Have a nice weekend folks.




4 comments:

  1. Nice looking shack. I take it that it's 28mm scale. Would it work in 15mm?

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  2. Why make the rivet smaller - why not make all the others larger? That way you could just 'drill' out the current mould rather than spend hours cutting a new one :-)

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  3. I think you are being to critical of yourself. I think that it looks good. Now stop being sick and get back to work.

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