Kobold Press Bestiary Miniatures: Iconic Races II Catfolk

Happy New Year!! Second week of the month update.
almost 2 years ago – Fri, Jan 13, 2023 at 06:07:40 PM

Hello backers!!

Welcome to the New Year, we hope all is going well for you.

First of all I would like to address the business end of things for this post. After that I would like to take some of your time to explain to you “How we make Minis”. Hopefully this will give you some insight into the process and a bit more appreciation for what it takes to give you quality miniatures!

WHERE WE ARE AT on January 13, 2023

The plastic injection machine was finally repaired last Saturday, January 6th. The total downtime was just a bit over 2 months. What this means is that for casting we are two months behind on everything. Our company conisists of a contract casting facility and a company that manufactures its own lines of miniatures. As such, on the contract casting side of things we have a lot of clients who we are also trying to make happy. One of those clients is Kobold Press. We are producing a line of miniatures in conjunction with them for the TOB III Kickstarter and as such, we have contractually had to put the work for them to the front of the list, since we were supposed to deliver that by the beginning of this month. 

I want to assure you however that we are not ignoring the work on this Kickstarter. Every piece that we are producing for their project is also included in the optional add-ons for this project so it is killing two birds so to speak, just picking the order they die. I really hope that makes sense to you all. Wherever we can we are working on the pieces for this Kickstarter at the same time. Having said that, we are putting in the hours and catching up as fast as we can! 

Bob (the new employee) is working out great and has been casting plastic all week. I have been making molds for everything that Ihas been completed through the other parts of the process. This includes many of the pieces for this Kickstarter. So at this point, nothing more can be done that is not being done! 

The other main bottle neck I was facing is that I have not able to have any time to sculpt for this project. My usual freelancers have not been able to fit additonal work in, as I explained in the last update. I have since started working with a couple of new people whose work is up to the standard that I expect for Effincool Miniatures. matt Gubser, who has done a lot of work for us in the past has just cleared out a block of time to also lend a hand to get the remaining sculpts comnpleted for this project!

You might think it is easy to find quality sculptors with the amazing 3-d renders you see on Patreons and the like. Some of these renders look lovely on the screen but the final printed versions have detail that is too soft or too dense to look like anything other than noise on the finished miniature. For this reason, I try to select artists who have experience sculpting for 28mm scale and with molding in mind. This really limts the field of who is an acceptable candidate.

As an aside, if you know of anyone who is looking for freelance work sculpting digitally, please do not hesitate to have them reach out to me at [email protected]. I would like to take a look at their portfolio to see if we can work together.

I am still very optimistic that we can this project out in the first quarter even though it is a long hard road to meet that goal. We will be able to start shipping some of the plastic orders early next week!

Once again, we appreciate your extended patience on this project. 

This pretty much wraps up the first part. If you have questions please do not hesitate to put them on this update or message through kickstarter if you are not comfortable asking your question publicly.

If you are uninterested in the process of how we make miniatures, please skip the next part and I thank you for your continued understanding and patience.

HOW WE MAKE MINIS

Miniatures for Effincool Miniatures start their life as a 3-d sculpture. This is a digital version of a concept art that is rendered in 3-d. For it to be able to be molded there are a lot of criteria that have to be met, which are not the same criteria that miniatures have to be printed.  Sounds confusing, but what this means is that just because I can print it does not mean that I can mold it. Sometimes items have to be thickened up for the metal or plastic to flow through and have rigidity. Other times the piece has to be sectioned up into parts so that the final sculpture requires assembly. 

The next step is to test print the piece. This is done on a lower quality 3-d printer. Once it is printed any parts that have to be test fitted are checked to make sure they go together and notes are made about anything that has to be fixed for the final print. Finally once that is complete the file is printed on our higher quality printers.

The higher quality prints are then molded in silicone rubber. This first mold will be used to cast pewter copies of the miniatures that we call “master patterns” or masters. 

The process requires the plastic pieces to be sandwiched between 2 layers of un-vulcanized rubber inside of a form called a mold frame. This mold frame is then place in a vulcanizer and jacked shut and heated. After an hour or so of cooking time the mold frame is removed and allowed to cool.

The resulting mold is then separated into 2 parts. The plastic core prints are removed from the rubber and a cavity is left in the surface. The molds we use for this process are round and have a  metal core form in them which creates a well in the very center of the mold. From the opening that is created by this well, we cut runners to each of the cavities that were formed by the plastic prints. This is how the metal will enter the cavities. 

The mold is the place inside of a machine called a spin caster. This machine spins the mold at very high speeds. As it is spinning, metal is poured into the center well and centrifugal force pushed the metal through the runners and into the cavities. After the metal cools a bit, the mold is opened and the metal miniatures are removed. This process is repeated 12-14 times until ther are at least 12 copies of each miniature.

The next process is the clean up the masters. Each one of the castings that comes out of the spincaster at this point is gone over with a fine file and sanded to remove any minor imprefections in the surface of the casting. Once that part is complete the miniature is polished quickly and ready to be final molded.

When we are doing the final molding for metal casting we repeat the previously outlined process but instead of having multiple printed patterns in the mold, we use the metal master patterns that we just created. 

The molds for the plastic injection machine are laid out a bit differently since the plastic material flows through injection pressure alone and does not need centrifugal force.

Once the molds have runners cut into them they are ready to be “tuned” for plastic injection. This is the process where we create a “recipe” based on several different factors. The injection time, the speed of the injection pump, the clamping pressure on the mold, the vacuum pressure needed for injection (this is what the broken $800 part that we replaced controlled) and a few other criteria must be set. 

Once we have some values in place we do the first test shot. After the mold cools completely, we look at the results and determine how to adjust the recipe based on things like swords and hands not filling, or other parts of the miniature flashing out. This tuning can go smoothly and be 100% on the 4th or 5th injection cycle (not often), or it could take 10-15 to get it right. Once the recipe is set though it may only require small incremental changes during a run of castings. 

This process is the other main bottleneck in the shop right now because the machine has been out of comission for so long and we have to wait for the molds to cool completely between each test run before we correct the recipe and take another shot at it.  It is agonizingly slooooow going! :-(

The last step is obviously the final quality control where we clip off any vent lines and base deformations. the pieces are then packaged and stocked on the fulfillment end of the shop where orders are picked before they are finally shipped to your hands!

That pretty much sums up the process and I hope you enjoyed this update and the pictures. I originally inteded to show this process from start to finish with only 1 model, but it was just not practical to do that given the fact that we are so far behind schedule. I hope that makes sense and as always thanks for the support and continued patience!!

John

December update #1
almost 2 years ago – Thu, Dec 15, 2022 at 08:49:22 PM

I will be doing 2 updates over the next few days. The first is mostly just technical stuff about where we are at on the project. The second one will be a more in depth delve into the process of how we make miniatures and some of the challenges I have run into in the course of this porject. If that is not your cup of tea at all please ignore the next update! :-)

WHATS GOING ON?

I have been holding back on making an update in the hopes that good news would be the order of the day. I really dread making updates that dont have good news, and unfortunately this is one of those updates. 

The long and short of it is that the plastic injection machine has been "crippled" for over a month. On Nevember 5, I contacted SiOCast to get a replacement part for it. The part they sent me was the incorrect part so I have now been in a limbo of waiting for the correct piece before I can make a single plastic miniature. 

This is not a world ending problem, as the failure is not a catastrophic failure of the machine. It just needs a $1,000 valve that takes 2 minutes to change out. This is the kind of growing pains I did not expect when we purchased the machine but nonetheless I have them. 

SiOCast is a Spanish company so due to some language barrier/cultural business difference, the communication has been very spotty on their end as well. I had hoped that the part that the said was shipped 2 weeks ago would have arrived by now...............as of Monday my replacement valve has still not shipped.

WHY WAS YOUR CARD CHARGED IF THE MINIS ARE NOT READY?

Since we knew we were going to be held up by plastic, Ed and I decided a couple of weeks back to try to at least start shipping people who had "metal only" miniatures that we were able to cast. As such I told him to go ahead and charge those cards. Instead of only charging the appropriate cards, the system charged all of the cards, so that is why you have all seen that your cards have been charged. This does not mean that your order is any faster in the queue at this point. We will still be shipping the orders as outlined in the next section. 

WHEN CAN YOU EXPECT YOUR MINIATURES?

The shipping will be handled in smaller batches on a daily basis, based on what we are able to ship . As miniatures are completed through the "sculpt/print/mold/cast" process they will be added to the database and Ed will be able to sort out batches of rewards that can be shipped based on the available products. Ideally this is not how we ship our Kickstarters. Normally we do all of the casting and post production packaging and then ship everything over a 1 or 2 week period, but I dont think that is fair to our backers at this point.

I hope that all makes sense.  I still think we are on target for complete delivery within the first quarter of the new year so that is a plus.

The next update will also share a bunch of the updated sculpts and completed pieces for this project also!

Thanks again for your continued patience with us as we grow as a company!

John

A MUCH OVERDUE UPDATE
about 2 years ago – Fri, Nov 04, 2022 at 11:29:19 PM

Greeting loyal backers!

John here.

 I know it has been a couple of months with no update. I apologize for that, but we have had a ton of gears in motion for the last 5 months and it is finally starting to look like things are coming together for us.

 There have been several questions raised by you as a group, probably the most important of which is "are we still on schedule?". The simplist answer is not exactly. I will explain further, but for now what I will say is that we are still on track to get the initial Catfolk miniatures out within this month so that is great news. If you only pledged for some group that only had catfolk, you will have your minis very shortly!

We are in the middle of production for Kobold Press' Kickstarter for Tome of Beasts III and have to have those shipping before the end of the year as per our contract with them. These minis are also being made available to you as backers of this project, so if you have not had a chance to look a them please do! 

Additionally we have made the miniatures from this campaign available to the backers for TOB III so we will be keeping Backerkit open until they have had a chance to order the minis also.

Please keep in mind that you can add the miniatures from TOB III to your order as well, since we have not closed out Backerkit yet for pre-order.

Now onto the part that I hate the most, the reasons why we are behind schedule.

First up is being shorthanded! Like everyone else who owns a business it has been very tough to get anyone to work. Before Covid we had 4 employees and things were moving smoothly. We lost all of them during that year and have not been able to get any of them to return to work.

As such, Ed and I figured we would have at least another person in the shop and trained when we launched this project. So far that has proven to be not the case.  What this means is that we are currently a two man operation.

Secondly, as many of you already know I own a seasonal restaurant and during the summer I am usually able to sculpt a lot and get pre-production molding completed. This summer I was incredibly short staffed, with my chef of 17 years having to take most of the summer off for personal reasons. Being shorthanded in the kitchen meant that I had to be the head chef much of the time. This just did not give me the ability to work a lot on this project and I apologize for that.

Lastly the team of sculptors that I use to pick up the slack in addition to my own work, have all been very overbooked and unable to take on much commission work. As such I have reached out to a few new people and so far the test pieces they have completed are up to par with the work that we do which is very promising.

All this means for this project is that there will be an unanticipated delay for which I once again apologize.

What we are doing to get back on track.

In addition to hiring some new sculptors, we have also just hired a longtime friend of ours to start helping with molding and casting. (He actually starts today in 30 more minute) Bob is a very smart hard worker, so we have no doubt that he will be able to pick things up quickly and be a grat employee.

As an updated timeline, we are shooting to have this project out the door in the early part of the start of next year, with the catfolk being available very shortly.

I also will be making at least monthly updates between now and then. As sculpting is finished I will be updating you along the way with renders and pictures of molding and casting progress. I hope this answer is sufficient for all of you and I want to say once again, thank you all for your continued patience on this great project!!

John

Pledge Manager - 1 Month+ Update
over 2 years ago – Tue, Aug 16, 2022 at 04:50:57 AM

Hey Effincooligans,

Your friendly neighborhood EffinEd coming at you with an update on the PM after a little more than a month of being open.  Last we reported the top 10 minis, here's the current top 10, with 2 "Groups" making the list this time around!!

• Mithral Dragon
• Weeping Treant
• Female Alseid
• Shadow Fey Enchantress
• Kobold Wizard
• Virtuoso Lich
• Kobold Alchemist
• Bearfolk Troupe
• Ratfolk Wizard and Mercenaries
• Abominable Beauty

To date, 88% of backers have compleed their surveys and 68% of the backers are choosing add-on's in the pledge manager!   So far 17,428 minis have been confirmed with at least another 1,000 if everyone completes their survey.

Incomplete Surveys and ALA CARTE Pledges

One quick note, there are 21 backers who started their survey but still have information to complete, whether it's your address or payment information.  Several have selected add-ons which are not included in the 17,428 figure noted above.  We have enough information to make our molding plan based on quantities ordered of each figure, but wanted to note this because some people may believe their survey is complete, but it actually isn't just yet.   In addition to that there are still 14 ALA CARTE pledges/surveys outstanding.  

Locking Orders and Charging

For those who haven't used PayPal, we will begin Locking Orders and Charging Cards to order materials in September.  The mold material, printer resin, mold resins and metal will be calculated to start making physical pieces and to get this project into production and out the door.  We've learned quite a bit from our last project in terms of injected resin molding and hope to have many less (though probably not zero) problems as we move into making these pieces.

Stay Effincool!

Ed

Pledge Manager 48 Hour Update
over 2 years ago – Fri, Jul 08, 2022 at 06:42:18 AM

Hello Effincooligans,

Your friendly neighborhood EffinEd here for an update after the first two days of the pledge manager.

So far, 61% of you have completed the surveys and we appreciate that so much.  It's added another 2500 pieces to the project so far.  

Also 50% of our backers so far have purchased add-ons so why not give you the Top 10.  As of this minute and in order from 1-10

• Mithral Dragon
• Shadow Fey Enchantress
• Weeping Treant
• Female Alseid
• Puffinfolk
• Kobold Wizard
• Virtuoso Lich
• Abominable Beauty
• Kobold Alchemist
• Empty Cloak

I also wanted to thank everyone who messaged early on telling me of any issues.  For some reason the Gearmass wasn't available to anyone, it appears that it's working now.  We forgot to activate PayPal on this project so it's now active as well, that was actually done within the first couple of hours of going live. And finally, we're keeping the pledge manager open through August.  

If you find any other issues, we can do what we can to work them out.. send me or John a PM and we'll get working on it.

Thank you all for your support!

Stay Effincool,

Ed