Saturday 22 February 2014

Tokyo was not built in a day

Hey all,

This week I've made a start on a small city. Not a big start by any means, just three buildings, but a start all the same. After a little bit of experimenting with wibbly-wobbly paper buildings, I decided that it would be better to just bite the bullet and make my city out of good 'ol resin. However, this is going to cost a bucket-load, so I'm going to chip away on this project a little bit at a time with the plan to make a decent 3'x3' urban layout by the end of the year.

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The two smaller buildings are by Scotia and the larger one is by Battletech.

I make a point of not doing 'bad reviews' on this blog out of common courtesy, but recently I ordered a fair few Scotia buildings, after being impressed by their low price and decent looking quality. However, when I got them I was less than pleased. Most of them were not terrible models, but were terribly cast, with nasty flash obscuring their detail, and the bottoms on many of them being 'hollow', as if they had not quite pored enough resin into the mold when they were being cast.

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In fact, for the first time ever, I asked for my money back for a few of the buildings that were so bad that I just couldn't see any way of using them!

In a similar trend, the Battletech building was also badly cast, with the same 'hollow bottom' problem that the Scotia buildings had. I've had some Battletech buildings before (that I irritatingly got rid of a few months ago, before starting this project) that were superbly cast with almost nothing in the way of air-bubbles or flash.

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I did not buy either variety of building direct from the manufacturer, and what with the bad castings, I am more than a little suspicious that they might be poor quality re-casts, rather than the genuine articles....

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In better news, I also painted up a Federation 'Long-Track' AT-T mobile radar recently. Its a GHQ model, and as with everything I've had from them recently, its nothing less than a miniature work of art.

Better luck next time, eh?

MM.

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