August 10th update
over 1 year ago
– Thu, Aug 10, 2023 at 07:46:12 AM
I have some good news for once. The materials needed to mold and cast the plastic side of this project have finally arrived!
Buckets of plastic and mold materials showed up at the shop yesterday!
I also believe that I now have sculpts of every single miniature completed. I have also continued to work on finalizing these sculpts and prepping them for molding but that progress has been very slow.
Here are the renders of the last few pieces that were needed. I hope they inspire your excitement to see this project finally looking at a finish line. That line is still in the distance but getting closer each day.
Thanks again for your coninued patience with the tardiness of this project.
See ya all at the next update!
John
July Update
over 1 year ago
– Thu, Jul 27, 2023 at 06:04:50 AM
I am making just a quick update today to let you know that I am still cranking along at the pace that I am able to. I should have a much better and more detailed update next week.
I can say that I have all but two of the sculpts in my hands at this point and most of them are ready to be printed and molded. In my update next week I will take the time to render all of them and hopefully at that point the Dissimortuum and the Fey Revenant will be completed!
My time situation has not gotten any better over the last 2 months due primarily to the schedule at my restaurant and constantly being short handed there, but that season is rapidly coming to a close. I have one more month of really long hours there and September is a much more relaxed work schedule.
I will once again re-affirm that everyone will get their miniatures. To help ensure this from a financial end, I decided a few weeks ago to sell off my collection of classic arcade games. The money from that sale ensures that there will be no financial burdens on the delivery of this project, so I am still at the same issue that has plagued me for months....NOT ENOUGH TIME!
So until next week
June Update
over 1 year ago
– Thu, Jun 22, 2023 at 06:53:09 AM
Hey gang.
WHY DO YOU STILL NOT HAVE YOUR MINIATURES-First of all I have to start by saying once again, sorry for the delay on this update. This has been a tough 6 weeks. Those of you who know me personally know that I also own a seasonal restaurant and the opening of the restaurant this year took a lot of effort. Having said that I have still been chugging along on this project as much as I can every day.
I have been really tied up with getting the Wastes of Chaos miniatures ready to ship for Kobold Press, so that has taken a lot of time. Unfortunately my contract work for Tome of Beasts 3 and Wastes of Chaos miniatures are under a very strict contractual deadline so I have had to prioritize the work for those ahead of this project. I know that that sucks and I feel terrible that it is one of the main causes of the delays on this project.
It still just keeps boiling down to the same problem. I took on a lot of work with the expectation that there would be more people working on it than just me.
WHERE THE PROJECT SITS-There are 7 outstanding sculpts that need to be finished. The good news is that those are in the hands of some very talented people. The bad news is that none of them are currently completed enough to show you in an update. I have been promised that they will all be done by the end of the month.
I am currently working on the cleanup of all of the other existing models and test printing them to ensure that they look proper and fit together properly before we mold them. This is also a job that takes a lot of time and there is only me to do that work.
I have also ordered all of the rubber and plastic that we will need to manufacture these miniatures so that I am sure to not run into supply chain issues taht might further delay. That material should be in my shop by early next week.
I am not sure what else to say today except once again, thank you for your continued patience and understanding on this project. I know that I am asking for a lot of it at this point and believe me when I saythat I am grateful for all of your support!
John
Making some headway
over 1 year ago
– Wed, Apr 26, 2023 at 06:44:03 AM
Helolow Backers!
First off, sorry for the delay on an update. I know I sound like a broken record sometimes, but it is really hard to make updates when it feels like there is not a lot accomplished.
Having said that, I am closing in on having all of the sculpting completed and as such this will be a pretty graphic heavy update. I will be showing renders of almost all of the models that are sculpted but first I have to explain something.
Just beacuse the "sculpting" is done, it does not make it a miniature. Each one of these pieces will have to be gone over and worked a bit to make sure that they are castable. This is one of the downsides to using contract sculptors. Things like a cape being too thin, or their being a void in the model that makes casting it impossible has to be dealt with. I also try to adjust every sculpt to make them in as few pieces as possible with the goal of everything being a single piece, since I know you all hate glueing models together! All of this takes time and manpower, which are a rare commodity.
As we are wrapping one of our other commitments to Kobold Press, The Tome of Beasts III Miniatures, we are also getting close to having to ship the next project for them, which is the Wastes of Chaos Miniatures, so there is still just a mountain fo work on my plate, but I assure you all I am working on this every day as hard as I can and we will get all of these minitures over the finish line!
I am only covering the models that were brand new sculpts for this project. I will try to do renders of all of the older models as well, but it took me almost 2 days to get these renders in order, so it is more of a priority to get the new stuff ready for test printing! I hope that makes sense. Also please keep in mind that these are all still considered WIP by me until I start finalizing them, so some of the posing might change a bit in that process. As such, if you all see anything you dont like about certain pieces please talk to me as these are just as much your miniatures as they are mine. I want you to be happy with the final product!
Anyway, without much more to say, lets dig into the pics.
Feb/March update
over 1 year ago
– Wed, Mar 08, 2023 at 05:55:47 AM
First of all, I apologize for not updating in February. I have a lot to talk about and have just been trying to figure out the best way to tackle it.
Due to the nature of this update I am going to make another update over this coming weekend. That update will be more fun than this first one. I will be doing renders of all of the new sculpts that have been completed but that takes time for me to do and I dont have the time to tackle those today. If you dont care about why the miniatures are late, then skip this update and wait for the next one!
This update is a really tough one for me to write. I pride myself on being a person who does what they say they are going to do. As such a person, I take it personally when things happen that get in the way of that. I know that does not sound like a great positive way to start an update...because it is not! The nuts and bolts of it is that I will not be able to meet the ammended timeline that I set out to try to have these miniatures out this month. There are a lot of reasons for this and I am going to explain them in the post. I know that you dont really want to hear excuses, but I just dont have anything else at this point to say.
WHY DONT I HAVE MY MINIATURES?
The simplist answer to this is manpower and equipment unreliability.
The first part needs a bit of explanation. Effincool Miniatures is a small company that is primarily the work output of John and Ed. For the last year or so Ed has been struggling with the stresses of his actual day job which has been a plant manager for a Fortune 500 manufacturing company. I dont want to spend too much time talking about it, but I will say that it has affected his mental health a bit.
In November Ed informed me that he was going to be gone for most of the month of December due to the upcoming birth of a new grand child in California. While he was gone for 3 weeks he had enough time away from his day job and Effincool to realize the affect it was having on his anxiety. When he returned from California he tested positive for Covid! After he cleared from Covid we talked a bit about what his plans moving forward were, at which point he informed me that he and his wife were quitting their jobs and moving to Arizona for a much simpler life. This also meant that he would be quitting Effincool, though he agreed to continue to help with some of the logistical things like answering some emails and helping to batch orders remotely.
I am not going to sit here and blame Ed for everything that is going slow, but what I can tell you that I am nose to the grindstone on all of the outstanding projects that I am left holding onto. This includes casting work for other clients as well as this Kickstarter. At the same time I am having to learn how to do the other 50% of Effincool’s business that I was relying on Ed to handle.
PRODUCTION ISSUES
The plastic injection machine we are using has had a few issues that we have covered in the previous updates. One of the things that did not become clear to me until we were already producing Huge miniatures with it for TOB III is that the hopper that the plastic melts in only has so much liquid plastic in it at any given time. This makes producing small and medium miniatures very rapid but Huge miniatures use the plastic faster than the machine can heat the next batch. What that means is that it is just waaaay slower than I anticipated it to be. For example on the TOB III miniatures project there is a miniature called the Garmvvolf. This miniature has 9 separate parts. Each of the 9 molds has 6 copies of the a single part in it. It takes running 9 molds at 3-4 minutes per mold to produce 6 miniatures. So for those pieces I am getting 6 complete models every 40 minutes or so and then I have to let the plastic level catch up in the hopper to do it again which takes another 10 minutes. My total production time for casting and packagin that miniature is roughly 12 minutes per completed model. I hope you can start to understand the delays.
TIME MANAGEMENT
Due to the current situation I am finding that I can really only process each job one at a time and any attempt to multitask seems to be a frustrating counterproductive effort. Since that is the case, the miniatures from Tome of Beasts III have taken up all of my production energy for the last 2 months straight. That project consists of 940 separate orders of 18 different miniatures. Each order is unique and must be hand picked from the production bins one at a time and packaged and shipped. Taking on that project made sense when more than one person was going to do it. As I sit here today I feel overwhelmed with it. It really is just more work than one person can get done in a timely fashion and for that I apologize once again.
THE SCULPTS
I am still running into problems with reliability from sculpting contractors. I have everything assigned but the pace of completion by the contractors is much slower than I would like. In the the next update I will show renders of what sculpts have been completed.
WHAT I AM DOING TO CORRECT ISSUES?
The primary problem is manpower as I already stated. What I am doing to correct that is that I have hired more people to work. Every job in this process is skilled labor, as I showed in the last update, so it is taking a bit of time to get people trained. The answer though is that we are currently producing more miniatures per day than we have in the last 5 years. We are still behind but we are catching up!
On the issue of the machine, there is really nothing we can do to speed that part of it up short of another $70,000 investment in a second machine which we cannot do at this point.
The time management issues at this point will have to continue being handled the way that I am handling them. At least until I can get my head comfortably back above the waterline.
On the issue of sculptor delays, the only thing I can do is to continue to crack the whip on the people that I have and try to get them to complete everything that is outstanding.
As always, I thank you for your continued patience on this project and appreciate all of the understanding you have shown me so far!
John
