Fine-Melt?

   So, I recently bought my first ever fine-cast mini, and figured I may as well give my opinions on the whole experience.

  Finecast as a whole has been something that's caught a lot of heat (thankfully not literally or they'd have melted..hah sorry). It's been advertised to us by GW as being the best thing since the sliced bread wheel, better to work with, better detail, cures diseases, exfoliates, performs excorsisms of the most ingrained demons, you name it. Any way I've not been sold on it as a whole, I like my metal minis, and the fact that the "significant production cost decrease" was passed on to comsumers by way of a price increase didn't really fly with me either.

  I'm a member of a pretty big club in Melbourne, infact we're currantly the winners of the VICC's (victorian wargaming champions, or something similar) in fantasy 40k and warmahordes. Not only that but at the most recent 2011 masters we had 5 of the top 12 players in australia come from our club. So when I say we're pretty keen about this stuff , you gota understand, I mean we're super keen about this stuff. Any way finecast has been around for 6 months now? and I am literally the first person to have bought a finecast model from the club, we've all been pretty sold on the bad publicity.
  Any way I've been collecting the white dwarf collectors mini's for a few years, and sadly the most recent one came out in finecast, not metal, so after much consternation I finally bit the bullet and headed in and picked it up.

The new white dwarf collectors ed mini, pretty swanky

  Thing cost me 30 bucks, down from 33 bucks... it felt like a lot at the time, but I cant remember what the last ones cost, so I cant really compare.. any way this is what you get in the box

 

 

 

 

Not a hell of a lot for 33 bucks if I'm honest

   The first thing I noticed was the ridiculous amount of flash on this mini!, holy crap!

Its alot to take in, but there are fully 12 joins to the spru, and if you look carefully theres some flash thats about 2mm thick that joins his right boot (left on screen) to the bottom of his beard, i was a bit worried about that.

The back view, so much flash! and also the telescope is bent..

The base is pretty cool, again a lot of large chunks of flash I was a bit iffy about

   So I'll be honest I was a bit intimidated by the sheer amount of cleaning up this model needed, but one thing I did notice was there weren't many mold lines nor many of those fine lines of flash that stick out from pointed bits of metal minis. But the large fairly thick chunks of flash joining parts, particularly the right boot to beard, and a couple at the rear of the hat, where i would actually have to carve into the mini to get rid of them had me worried.
   It took about 30 minutes of cleaning to actually clean up the model, a lot more than I'd usually expect, but i found cutting into the actual material very easy, basically it cut away like a firm dry soap. This had me paranoid cause it wouldn't take much to actually just destroy the mini with an accidental cut. But overall i found it to be pretty easy to clean the model up with just a knife, hardly needing the file at all, so not bad on that count finecast.. not bad..
   While i was doing this i took the opportunity to look very carefully for any molding bubbles etc that seem to have plagued a lot of the finecast minis on the net, i found a couple small ones on the scabbard edge and the edge of the cloak, but they really did take a lot of looking to find. Another thing I noticed was that the lid of the chest was so thin that I could actually see through it when i held it up to a light, not sure how well that's going to hold up to any kind of heat.

Here's the pieces cleaned up, not my best job, and you can see where I had to carve away some large chunks of flash

Rear view, and you can see how thin the chest lid is, you can actually see through it here

Stuck together, another thing I noticed was how fast finecast sticks with superglue, literally the instant it's placed it sticks, doubled edged sword, since I'm never satisfied with my first placement, but I also hate holding bits together till they set.

 Once I had the mini together another significant thing popped out at me, just how light it is, it weighs literally nothing, it feels like you're just holding a base, not a whole mini. It is literally lighter than a plastic equivalent, and much much lighter than a resin equivalent. Not sure if thats good or bad in the scheme of things, but I'm sure it makes shipping costs a lot cheaper for GW..

   The major improvement GW advertised to us over metal minis was the "detail" these minis had compared to their metal counterparts, something i found, and still find hard to believe. Not having a metal version of this mini means I cant show them side by side, but I do have another white dwarf unpainted so i thought I'd take a few shots to show them side by side.

 

   It's pretty hard to tell via these pics, I really should have black washed the metal mini first. But the level of detail to me is really basically the same. The crispness of the detail however seems to be something the finecast holds better, but im pretty adamant that's the fact that the metal is reflective and just doesn't show it as well to the naked eye, where as the finecast material shows shadows a lot more clearly, emphasising the detail. Once I have the minis painted I'll throw up some pics for comparison.

   Any way, as my first finecast experience it wasn't as dreadful as I expected, then again it wasnt' the experience GW told us to expect, no heavenly choir, no angelic horde decending from the skies, no naked chicks and beer.. overall I give finecast a big resounding "meh". My opinion that it's a GW profit raising excersize has not been changed now that I own a mini.