End of Times: A New Beginning

Over the past two years there have been a number of Miniature designer/manufacturers who have announced their retirement from the market. I have found several of these announcements quite disturbing.

I have been operating within this hobby as if these ranges and companies would trade forever. There was never any sense of urgency for me to buy figures because some of these traders had been in the business for decades and I naively presumed their doors would always be open for when I got around to my latest investment.

Aventine Miniatures, Redoubt Enterprises, Grubby Tanks (carriers for Britannia Miniatures), Elite Miniatures Australia and now Gripping Beast (who also carry Front Rank and Calpe Miniatures) have either ceased operating or announced their intention to do so. I've called this post 'End of Times' because most of the above owner/operators are shutting down because they are retiring - and I am too.

I was listening to the latest Wargames Soldiers and Strategy podcast (WSS114 'The Show Must Go on?') and they were discussing the closure of Gripping Beast and questioning if the wargame market has much room for metal miniatures. For me, there always will be. I just placed a GBP250.00 order with Elite Miniatures for a stack of French 7YW infantry and this week I will follow up with a substantial order with Black Hussar. But I am not the future of the hobby, I'm a veteran gamer, groomed on Airfix - always historical and almost always divisional sized battles.

Of course, what I really fear is being unable to access the various superb sculpts these ranges offer or offered. I get that the price of metals is putting the squeeze on many ranges and no doubt custom reduces. So here's an idea or rather, a question - why not scan, mould and recreate the same sculpts in plastic? I understand this would require significant investment but these little works of art would be preserved and lower price points would enable the shifting of a lot more units over time. Looking back to Airfix 1/32 scale figures, they came in a range of poses and packed loose in the box and required next to no assembly. Why can't we have the same ranges made available but in a robust, hard plastic?

For the record, I know nothing about plastic mould procedures so I'm probably talking bunkum. 

For some reason the entry of plastic figures at least at the 28mm scale has almost uniformly been offered as multi-part, poseable figures requiring assembly. Do they always need to be?

I'll still buy metal figures whilst ever there are ranges I like, because I can afford to - even at the wicked currency exchange rates for an Australian.

3D printing leaves me stone-cold when it comes to figures - another matter for models.  It's the prospect of dealing even more with computers and programmes which I shun and resin has all sorts of limitations. The Gods only know what AI will do with and to the hobby. I'm more likely to treasure even more the efforts of human physical talent and skill. Long live the sculptors.

I have likely a few times my own body weight in unpainted white-metal but those piles of potential are about to get seriously eroded to the point of extinction. I have long anticipated super-charging my hobby once I retired, replacing 50 hours a week with a good deal of miniature wargaming and all the associated activities. That also means my blogs will start filling again with content as my projects develop.

I have just turned sixty and I will be finishing up my current deployment in Papua New Guinea. I return home to Canberra at the end of this month to commence eight months of leave prior to leaving the workplace for good. For me that's been thirty-six years in policing. I don't generally discuss my profession and I keep a largely anonymous profile across the internet for reasons of security and discretion. My job also has little to do with my hobby so it just fails the relevance test.

I plan on quite a bit of travel and now I can plan my trips away for as long as I like and time visits abroad to coincide with events - like UK wargames conventions. When that time approaches, I'll likely reach out to a few of my fellow bloggers for a chance to meet them (you) in person.