The Craft
Combining three skills!
Sculpting
Mould making
Spin casting
Sculpting
Focus on an object and then try to reproduce it into a scaled down model, basically that’s what we sculptors do. The object can be a man or a woman, but it can also be a vehicle, a spaceship, a weapon, in fact it can be any object we wish to imagine.
For me it’s important how to look at an object, if you imagine everything is different in shape you know you will need to be flexible in your method to reproduce it. One of the great things about sculpting is that you never have to make a miniature twice, but you will have to adapt your way of thinking around an object many times. So with this perspective in mind, every time I make a new miniature I think about what’s the best approach, it sharpens the mind and keeps the challenge interesting.
I use hardened out “Milliput” to sculpt our “Master” miniatures. Of course after many years we have an arsenal of little body parts available so not each miniature has to be sculpted from scratch. Basically I use pre casted parts as needed and add “Milliput” where required.
Mould Making
Basically two different moulds are needed to produce miniatures. first we have to make a sub-master mould, this is the mould made from the newly sculpted figurine. Castings that come out of this mould are direct copies from the master figurine and are called sub-masters. Next step is to cast enough sub-master figures to make a production mould, this has to be done one by one. Afterwards the sub-master figures need to be cleaned to perfection.
Our production moulds are made of vulcanised rubber, this means they have been pressurised in mould frames under high temperature.
After vulcanisation we manually need to cut out all gates and vents and test cast the new mould. After testing it’s time to fine-tune the mould by cutting additional vents and gates where required.
In order to produce the best possible quality of miniatures we try to uphold to highest standards in each of these step.
THE FURNACE
Spin Casting Wargame Miniatures
Final step, casting high degree pewter into spinning production moulds. Only just before the pandemic started I invested in new casting equipment, highly recommended Italian machines from the company “Nicem”.
Previously all our miniatures were spin casted in a home-made machine. It did the job perfectly but you had to know what you were doing, for instance pressure on the moulds was regulated by how tight you tightened the nuts.
Adjusting the old moulds to the new machines and making dozens of new moulds consumed a great deal of time and is still continuing.
We do see some light at the end of the tunnel, production is almost running smoothly again for part of our ranges and we have a lot of new additions nearly ready to be added to the catalogue.
