Kobold Press Bestiary Miniatures: Iconic Races II Catfolk

Making some headway
almost 3 years 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
almost 3 years 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

Happy New Year!! Second week of the month update.
about 3 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
about 3 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
over 3 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