[OT] Historicals and flash (was:Re: Ships)

> On Thu, 27 Apr 2000 23:10:31 -0400, "Laserlight"
<laserlight@quixnet.net>
> wrote:
It's
> gotten to the point that when I work on historicals, I have completely

While I appreciate the tongue-firmly-in-cheek tone of these posts (and
am very flattered by the comments!), your comparison between the historicals
and SF&F markets is actually an interesting point. In those few scant moments
that may laughably be described as "free time", I've recently I've been
dabbling around in a bit of hysterical (sorry, I mean historical) stuff again
in a desperate effort to actually do a bit of social gaming
(rather than eat, sleep and breathe SF/GZG). To this end I've been
buying some stuff from Foundry (Old West, ACW and Darkest Africa) and Skytrex
(15mm Western Desert WW11). Now, the Skytrex Command Decision 15mm vehicles
are lovely, but their infantry packs, while nice figures, are COVERED in
flash - on many that I have the area of flash is bigger than the
figure!! Cleaning this off a 15mm infantryman is a long, slow job. Even the
Foundry figures, which everyone raves about as being wonderful (and the ARE
very good figures) have a certain amount of flash and are also very heavily
covered in the little threads of metal caused by flow down the air escape
channels in the mould, making the cleanup time for each figure considerable.
It made me think that the SF&F market is really quite spoilt - we expect
clean, flash-free figures to a degree almost unheard of to the
historical gamer. Flash is a fact of life with metal casting, and gets worse
with
(a)
the age of the mould and (b) how hard you run the mould in a casting session.
While I do my best to keep it to a minimum on our own stuff, some of our
moulds for the older figures and ships are getting to the point
where a bit of flash is unavoidable - but when they get so worn that
there is more flash than figure then it really is time to make a new mould! I
don't really know what all this rambling is about, just some disconnected
thoughts...... ;-)

> Even the Foundry

The foundry figures I've bought were fine, but thinking about it I bought
those from a retailer. Maybe the mail order customers are getting a raw deal
and that no self respecting figure manufacturer would dare try and sell flash
heavy figures in see through blister packs.:)