Don't ask me, I do all my writing after the sun goes down. It's Jstove here and I've got a story to tell.
Editor's note- Recasting copyrighted miniatures is wrong. It ranks up there with pirating music, buying bootleg DVD's etc etc.
That being said we're posting this article by Jstove as a "Cautionary Tale" about how things can quickly spiral out of control if you shouldn't be doing some things to being with (like recasting resin or worshiping Chaos).
Spikey Bits does not condone this sort of behavior in any way, which seems to have rocketed to near epic proportions with the loss of "legitimate" bit sellers across the world.
And for the most part, well Games Workshop seems not to care, as none of the bits or Forge World re-casters on eBay or otherwise have been officially shut down.
It's all quite perplexing really to say to the least, especially to someone who's "legitimate" bits business was effective shut down recently by GW's harsh policies.
But I digress. Please keep these disclaimers in mind as you read this article, recasting copyright protected resin is ultimately a bad idea. -MBG
Not so long ago, I was helping this kid who goes to my LGS by teaching him how to build silicon molds and casting resin, and that if he bought the materials, I'd give him a crash course in how to do it. About the same time, another good guy came around with a fistful of gorgeous Forgeworld cataphractii terminators, and as luck would have it, he had one spare and unassembled.
How exactly you have spare forgeworld terminators, I'm not sure, but go with it, right? So after I taught my buddy how to build molds and pour resin on easy stuff like casting scenic bases, we figured it was a good opportunity to mint some terminators- DON'T WORRY EVERYONE, WE'RE NOT INFRINGING ON GW! The terminators we're casting were Russian Ebay Forgeworld knockoffs, so its okay! (its probably not okay.) (it's not- MBG)
Don't worry though, because this story isn't about how to do it, and how you can bring down society by garage-casting your own models until GW comes to your door and kicks your teeth in. We aren't going to get that far.
Because as a professional that learned casting in college, I'm here to tell you today that if you don't make the investment in time and effort and buy all the equipment to do casting properly- DON'T BOTHER, IT WILL END IN TEARS.
Yep, ignore all the garbage you read about casting and resin 3d printers and how they're going to ruin the business by allowing you to copy/paste space marines from your desk. If you aren't a serious hobbyist, this isn't for you, and you're not going to pull a fast one on anyone and save a bunch of money knocking off miniatures. Its just not gonna happen, to do it right, you'd have to put in more money than you'd get out just buying the models retail.
Now, where were we in this sad little story? Well, I took the cataphract, built the molds, opened them up, got the parts out, and we were ready to cast some knockoffs of knockoffs.
Now here's where the cautionary tale starts, friends. Because Little Buddy (who will remain unnamed so as not to die of shame after reading this article) bought the materials and was running the show, I told him, "Alright, I want you to mix and pour the resin on this mold, its for practice."
I also told him I was going to keep the virgin model that came out of the mold, because I'm shifty like that, but its important that Little Buddy get his practice runs in.
Guess what happened? If you guessed the Cautionary Tale part, you're correct. Little Buddy hammed up the mix ratios of the resin, poured a bad batch, and ruined the mold. I mean devastated it. The resin didn't catalyze correctly because the mixture was FUBAR and it stuck to the mold, so when it came time to retrieve the parts, I was doing damage control and just trying to pry the damn thing out of the rubber just so that we could chop it up and recycle it.
When the terminator did come out, it was a terrible frankenstein. Now, I'm not going to talk about what went wrong and how I could have saved it, because I already did that- This is a cautionary tale. If you aren't a hundred percent invested in learning how this process works, you are going to be sad, because mistakes in the resin casting process are EXPENSIVE.
At the end of the day, when I got that little miscast jerk out of the mold, he took most of the mold with him, and Little Buddy was out about $80 worth of casting material.
That's right, What we have here is an $80 mistake. Just because somebody didn't mix the right ratio of chemicals. One little mistake mixing a resin latte, and we're out 80 bucks. That's casting in a nutshell.
So now you're wondering, "What does an $80 mistake look like?"
Well, I'll show you. I call him Lord Scumpuddle, the Most Expensive Chaos Lord.
This is Scummy As
any canny observer can tell, he is what we professionally call
"Completely F'ing Ruined." But after an $80 mistake, I figured hey,
gotta get something out of it, so I told Little Buddy I'd at least get
him the consolation prize of the Most Expensive Chaos Lord he ever
bought.
Now, what's wrong with Scummy aside from the fact that he's ugly, Nurgly, and miscast? Well, the cunning observer will notice all the little white flecks all over him. That's rubber. Its pieces of the mold. The mold that went with him. Scummy didn't just turn out to be a bad seed, he obliterated the womb he was born in, and that mold rubber- Yea, that's expensive.
But I took Scummy home with me, went through the bits box, and tried to make him work. Since Little Buddy fortunately played Nurgle, (wow, people play nurgle demons and CSM? Who would have thought? I heard plague marines are good.) a lot of the bad casting could just be either puttied over or painted as battle damage. I also tried to make sure he could represent a wide variety of models- He got a reaper bones necromancer scythe so he could do double-duty as Typhus, and I slapped on the crummy power sword as well so that he could be a vanilla lord with a power scythe and the murder sword in a pinch. Scummy's a versatile kind of guy, and can represent any CSM HQ he could want to be.
Lord Scumpuddle got painted up in traditional Death Guard livery, and he
even got his own puddle of water effects scum to splash around in. Now
he's a happy camper. Well, happier than he was when he came out of the
mold. Let's just say that.
Of course, Scummy's tragic miscasting wouldn't be the only low point of his career, he also had another accident that involved his water effects, which depending on whether or not you think the bubbly film around his ankles looks cool or not, was either a good thing or a bad thing.
Now, I won't blame anyone for this one, because while waiting for his water effects to dry on a window sill, some friends came over and Scummy had a little run in with the Budweiser chapter and the strike cruiser Party Foul, and ended up tipped over and ruined, and nobody at the party seemed to notice or tell me that someone had spilled Woodland Scenics all over my kitchen.
I should be a little angry about that, but whatever. I left him out on the window sill at a party right? What was going to happen?
After that tragedy involving his little bubble bath, I refilled the base to get his swamp puddle going again, and now its healthy and full once more, and this is pretty much Lord Scumpuddle the Twice Cursed as we see him today.
And that, dear friends, is the story of Lord Scumpuddle, the Most Expensive Chaos Lord. Not bad for Nurgle, right? (Yea, pretty bad.)
Also, as a bonus feature, here's Lord Stinkfist the nurgle bikelord I made for Little Buddy.
