The West Coast discount

  OK, I most likely messed this up somehow, but here goes.

  On my generic template web-store I set up some shipping costs that have been as low as I could make them. Well, it turns out that is not the case with locations further away from the east coast. In particular the west coast buyers have been losing me a few bucks each package. I did not want to raise costs across the board because then the nearby folks lose money. So I got a little scale and weighed each item. Added a small  amount for the box and tried to get my web store to automatically calculate shipping based on zip code and weight.

  Right now I have no idea if it will work and how it might affect overseas buyers.  (the west coast dicsount was one thing, but the overseas discount is really extreme)  If there is any problem please let me know and I am going to keep a close eye on how much it charges and how much it actually costs to ship.

  Thanks for your patience in this. Shipping costs are really a lot.   I really wish there was a way to save this money for people but I have not figured this out.

  I have to ship a 20 pound box to the UK and the post office wants $107 for this. I went to UPS and they want $311. For that amount I could almost buy a budget plane ticket from price line and fly it there in my carry on luggage!

  I will be keeping an eye on this and please complain loudly if a problem arises. I need to get this sorted.

Another post already.

 Ok, this is not an attempt to bombard you with marketing.  But there are a couple of questions I have neglected to answer and this might be a good time to explain.

First off- the comparison pics-

 

This is a pic of my friend Sam Colechio's infantry next to the new building flat.

  As you can see, Sam is planning a scenario that occurs within a mini-storage complex.

  Here is Sam's blasted Cathedral with some 15mm guys sneaking past.

  Sam is the GM of our role play group. In spite of the fact that my character lost a leg, hand, eye, and arm he is still OK since he likes building stuff for me to show you. Some might say he was a bit harsh but I would never suggest that.  (because I like my remaining leg and eye)

  The other question I get is about stuff I am out of. Let me try to explain that. As I work on things it tends to illustrate how badly some of my earlier ideas really were. And the thick models are one of the worst. They take a long time to run due to increased cooling time. This actually decreases the amount of parts I can make at a time because my barrel of water gets hot and has to be allowed to cool. I plan on adding some sort of radiator to the garden hose but have not gotten around to it.  And the thicker molds take nitrogen, which is another variable to play with.  Add to that the increased shipping cost for a heavy pack or 2 and making thinner parts seems to be the way to go.  So, since they sell very slowly I tend to put them way down on the to-do list.  I will have to re-visit them again,  but it is always more exciting to plot something else to make.

  Also, the main things I sell are bases. It seems every time I turn around I am out of bases and have to make more. So it pushes the problematic molds further down on the to-do list.  I do have plans to remake a lot of things in the future but the old 24 hours in a day limitation keeps holding me back.  The timber frame house will be a lot thinner someday, that is for sure.

   I hope this explains things a bit and I will make every effort to replace the missing items with a newer version or a reprint.

Thanks for the questions.



Hope springs eternal

  Hello again folks.  The weather is finally starting to cooperate a little bit and that means we all wake up from our winter time slump.  I have long advocated for human hibernation, with continuous eating of fattening foods starting on Thanksgiving and ending with the Super Bowl. Then, we simply roll over on the couch and awaken in mid April about 100 pounds lighter and ready for fishing season. Sadly, science has failed to work on this brilliant idea.

  I want to give some tips for other people trying to make their own molds out there, but first I would like to get atop a soap box and explain the type of mindset one has to have to tackle this. You have to be an old timer. Let's face it, people today are usually not equipped to deal with things the way they did 40 years ago. We went to the moon in 1969 or crying out loud. How did we do it? By saying "What the Hell?,  Let's go for it."  The people of that era were notorious risk takers compared to today's safety obsessed crowd. A 1968 Road Runner could be purchased with a 425 horse power Hemi and DRUM BRAKES.  Running on bias ply tires and wearing a lap belt. World War One pilots had a longer life expectancy.  Today the typical car is packed with a mighty 100 horse power 4 cylinder and has 11 dozen air bags. This is getting out of control. I am no longer allowed to use DDT on these blasted mosquitoes flying around.  Why? Because we are all brainwashed to be afraid of things. Not to take risks and fail. Well failure ain't so bad. Trust me, I have a lot of experience with it and after a while it sort of loses its sting. Your first couple of tries are going to be crap, and I still take a pretty high failure rate after doing this for over a year. I just had a whole lot of time and bits go down the drain in a failed mold, but it is part of the terrain out here in budget land. Setting here kicking myself is not going to get me too far.

  So, after the last post I have some advice. Find a place called Fastenal. There is one around the corner from me and I am sure they have online sales. They sell pre-hardened 1/8 drill rod for about $2.75 for a 3 foot section. Cut into 4 inch pieces that makes a lot of ejectors and keeps the fire trucks away.  They have lots of other goodies too, like brass fittings for the cooling lines. The 1/8 rod from Lowe's has too much variation in diameter and this causes problems.

  Most of the stuff I use I pick up at Harbor Freight, but there are sometimes some issues with it. For example, the 1/8 drill bit they sell can go from .120 up to .128 in size. Does not seem important but it is.  Get a micrometer and check the drill bit diameter and the rod diameter. They should be tight so plastic does not ooze around the rod and grip it causing the part to stick.  I am going to make another video soon I think showing the steps more closely.

  And now for some pics of things I am working on-

  This is a conversion part and marks my first use of clear plastic. The inside is able to take LED lights. Have a little refinement to do on this one. Will allow space ship modelers to recreate variations of a popular sci-fi series ship.

  This is a custom base mold made for a client. Little sockets were tricky. It is for 6mm scale stuff. I can send you a link to the guy to buy them from if anyone wants them.

  Here is the next mold up for a client. I am programing this one and going to run it soon.

  Here are some terrain pieces that are being done in resin. It is going to be an experiment to see how resin works out. Going to look into this as far as I can, as it seems interesting.

  And this is my attempt to make my women warriors more "heroic" scale.  She has had a steady diet of vitamin "S".  (sugar)  This has got be be close and I want to cut these out someday. Notice how the gun requires a forklift. Perfect fit for the industry standard.

  Finally getting the replacement for the billboard designed. A simple little piece that adds to the table because you can glue on business cards from your local businesses and make your battle field look familiar.

  The pond has new goldfish so I hired these duckling mercenaries to stand watch. Here they are alertly on patrol. They ran screaming from a frog so I am not too confident right now.

  And finally, the next picture is proof that I am not as bad as some when it comes to deciding what to make. Seriously, how did no one question this before it went to market?

    Have a nice week and enjoy the beautiful weather.

Link to video

  I posted to tabletop gaming news and realized the video was in the old stuff section. So here is another link to the how to video for any newcomers who might not want to read all the old stuff.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-g-SJ-P9Wg&feature=youtube_gdata

Being wrong...............

  Hi again folks.

  When writing this blog I have often put forth my theory that the average American can pretty much figure anything out on his own and do it themself.  This is what allowed us to do all the neat things we have done over the years, like invent a time and matter displacement device all the way back in 1943.  (see Philadelphia experiment)

   Given an exacto knife, a Wikipedia diagram and enough time I am certain I could locate and remove my appendix in only a few tries. And who needs fancy radiation treatments when I have a perfectly good micro-wave right in the kitchen? Remove the door and over ride the saftey switch, and just that easy I am curing my ailments, saving money, AND making a Hot Pocket.

  However, this does not always work. Recently I was trying to make some better alignment, support and ejector pins. The cheap metal from Lowes was bending and getting the ends mushroomed from the force.  So I picked up some drill rod blanks, a really nice, smooth and straight type of metal. Only the web-site said they had to be heat treated by slowly heating them to 1700 degrees and quenching them in oil. How hard can that be? I have a cutting torch and it gets really hot. I do not know how hot, but if 1700 degrees is good, 17,000 degrees must be 10 times better. What could go wrong?

   Well......it turns out that super heated oil is REALLY flammable. And the science of metal working is a bit more complex than all that. I ruined most of the pieces by making them so brittle I can snap them by holding them in my hand and pressing with my thumb.  I guess what I am trying to say is that maybe sometimes it pays to have the right tools for the job.

   But things are getting done around here. I am going to be playing around with some new ideas, like this little model.

  I was looking at the gothic building and realized the only thing on the back was a couple of  shelves to glue floors to. So I was wondering if it would be possible to make a one sided building and simply have little squares to glue in for floor supports. This is the result of my little experiment. It is still 15mm in scale, the front entrance door is 20mm tall. The back loading dock doors are pretty large and I guess you could use a lot of them and make a shipping terminal.

  I am packing 2 of the door sprues and one window sprue per pack.  I will also make an all window pack available in case you want to add a second story to your building. The back side of these is simply a flat plate and this makes things a lot easier for me. There are no alignment pins to worry about and that cuts down on a lot of time needed to set up and run as well as making the mold itself. If you can think of anything else for a flat plate building design let me know. I was thinking maybe an air conditioner or vent might be cool.

  I have to apologize for the delay in getting any new things done, but it has been a bit busy doing some custom things and getting the full range of bases done.  There are a few things not in the store anymore. This means I only have a few left and have not had time to make some more yet. If you want something you know used to be there send me an e-mail and I will let you know how many I have left.   There are some things I want to re-do and make better, like the bill board and some others.  But time is always a limiting factor.

   And finally, it seems a squad of rabbits set up a listening post about 4 feet from where I am setting at my PC at this very moment.  One morning one of them was be-headed and laying outside my door. The next day another suffered the same fate, so I had to take the survivors into custody for their own safety.  I know that they will someday grow up to eat my blue berries,  (which I am currently heavily entrenching for the upcoming hostilities)  but it is against the Geneva convention for non-combatants to be treated this way. So now we are feeding the little guys with an eye dropper and waiting for them to get big enough to elude whatever merciless killer is stalking them.

     Have a great weekend.

Back from the show.. barely

Cold Wars was an interesting time. Lots of things to look at.  Swapped some bases with the Goblin Factory for some of his most excellent hobbits. Overall a good time to meet and talk to lots of fine folks. It pays to listen I guess. The number one comment in e-mails and in person has been- if only this was 28mm..........So that is going to be something to work on once I get some of these projects done. I will get to it, but I picked up a few more custom bits to make for folks and I am sorry if my little store has not had anything new for a while.  The sprue I am working on seems to be impervious to milling bits and snaps them with alarming frequency.  It has been called a few choice adjectives and still defies me. I am down to the .021" bits and almost done. What a tough go.

  So it was a nice show except for this.
 On Friday night the tranny blew out of my Chevy truck with only 59,000 miles.  The garage rolled a critical hit on the financial damage chart, and I failed my warranty saving throw and took full damage.  Egads.

  But on a positve note I met the guys from Bronze Age minis.  Very nice guys with a real can-do attitude. We brainstormed a bit and I was more than a little inspired.    In a flash of ingenuity it seems there may be another way to make molds that does not require painstakingly slow milling. Previous flashes of ingenuity have resulted in bodily injury, but this time I am more optimistic than most.

  Will keep you posted after I make more progress, but if people keep wanting stuff I got to keep making it. 

  Have a great weekend and enjoy it.  It may be the last one before we have to mow the lawn! 
  

Slow days, packing for the show

  Hi all.  Just getting ready for Cold Wars. It is quite convenient to have a convention a few minutes drive away. It lets me test the waters and still not have to stay overnight.  I am trying to make about 20 packs of each base type and other things, and make a display rack.  It is nice to talk to people.  Last time I was a guest of Rod from Highlander Studios, but this time I paid for my own table.   Sadly, I do not have a lot of new stuff to offer at the show. I have been working quite a bit on finishing out the line of bases and doing custom sprues, but I have not really made a pile of cool new things for my web store. 

   This little piece will remain untitled, but it has to connect to an existing model kit which makes it hard.  There is also some semi-clear plastic invloved with it.  The inside has to hold small lights too.  It was fun to model in the CAD program. Still have to do the wings for it.

 

  And this is a sprue of odds and ends that has been a real challenge. Lots of little corners to snap bits off with, and there was also another problem.  It was very windy one day and the power went out for a brief second.  Just a very short second. BUT the CNC servos are controlled by pulses of electricity. A string of G-code that is a 20,000 lines long goes by very fast, and even a split second of power fluctuation causes real nightmares.  It is times like that where it pays to have good solid walls to bang your head against. Tried my best to recover it, but I will not know exactly if this thing is going to line up OK till after I finish the second side and hope for the best.

    I found an artist who is going to help with some of the design work so I can focus on making stuff. The little plastic machine seems to be a bit happier of late and rarely tries to explode.  The you-tube video was fun to make, and it was very nice to read the comments both here and on a few forums where I posted it. Just 100,000,000 more views and it will pay some revenue.

  And that is about all the goings on around here.  Have a good time at Cold Wars and say hi if you are there.