Following on from an earlier post I couldn’t resist picking up some Pig Iron Kolony Rebel 28mm heads from Scrap Dragon in Australia. They arrived late last week, so here’s a quick review of them.

I ordered two packs, and each came in a small baggie containing two copies of the white metal sprue you see in the above photo. In each pack you get twelve of the basic gas mask wearing heads, plus two each of the four ‘command’ style heads for a total of 20 heads per pack. Possibly ordering two packs was a bit of overkill, but they’re so cheap - working out at less than $1NZ per head it seemed a shame not to!

The heads are well cast with a reasonable amount of detail on them and I expect them to paint up well. There’s some fine mold lines to clean up, but sensibly no mold line crosses any face. Scale wise the heads are a touch smaller than related plastic 40k heads from Games Workshop. This second photo shows two Pig Iron heads compared to plastic GW Cadian and Catachan heads.

Personally I find the Pig Iron heads to be an acceptable match to the GW plastics. In fact I intend to use these metal heads to convert up a Necromunda Scavvie warband from various GW WHFB and 40k plastics. I think it’s a nice touch that the heads are fairly bare around the back (most of them simply have a strap) as it gives you options for converting on helmets or hoods. For my Necro scavvies I do intend to add tattered green stuff hoods, which I should be able to do without having to cut anything down.

Here’s another shot just to show you the head scale on a GW Cadian and Catachan bodies. I’ve left the arms off so the head/torso ratio is obvious and, given that we’re dealing with slightly oddly scaled 28mm sculptures, the heads looks fine. If anything the slightly smaller heads actually make the over-sized GW figures look more realistically proportioned in my opinion.

So in summary I’d happily recommend Pig Irons sci-fi head ranges to any 28mm converter or sculptor out there. They’re excellent quality and the price is perfectly acceptable given the quantity of heads in each pack. On a related note I’d also happily order from Scrap Dragon again too, in fact my receipt came with a 5% discount coupon code of my next order, which is a excellent way to guarantee return custom!

Would you play a Collectible Miniature Game?

* 71% (149) - Yes
* 29% (62) - No

I happily play a CCG (Collectible Card Game) amongst my friends, however CMGs (Collectible Miniature Games) like Pirates of the Spanish Main, Dreamblade and the recently announced Monsterpocalypse don’t really attract me at all. The problem with any collectible game was highlighted by the cancellation of Dreamblade late 2007. Once official support and tournaments for the game are gone, who really cares? Certainly you can still play the game yourself, but the money you’ve spent paying for rare and powerful figures or cards has been wasted because overnight their resale value becomes nil.

Also as a modeler I find the figures offered in CMGs universally poor in terms of casting and painting. Hence they have no intrinsic attraction that drives me to collect them. However it seems I’m in the minority in this respect judging from our last poll as two thirds of the visitors would happily play CMG games - which ones I wonder? Perhaps I’m not looking at the right games…

Our next poll relates to purchasing new games too. Locally here in New Zealand we’re facing something of an economic downturn, driven largely by the continued weakness of the greenback and the US sub-prime mortgage debacle which is driving local interest rates up, on the back of a bunch of 2007 hikes from our friendly reserve bank. This means salary earning mortgage holders like yours truly have been watching our spending in the last twelve months, and the first thing to get cut was hobby spending. Are you in the same boat?

Another month has been and gone, so it’s time for a Hirst Arts Cathedral update! This has been a rather hellish month for me at both work and home for various reasons, so only a moderate amount of progress has been made since the last update.

Although it’s a little hard to see in this photo I’ve built up all four sides of the first bell-tower and glued them together into two right angled pieces. Considering my reckless disregard for the assembly instructions the tower actually fits together quite well! This tower is almost ready for painting too as only the interior doorways are lacking a handful of those precious and rare 1″x1½” gothic flat tiles to finish them off.

Speaking of which I’m still laboriously casting those pieces three at a time from the two Hirst Arts molds I own that include them. I now have enough of them to build both the front and back walls of the main Cathedral hall before starting work on the second gallery. I haven’t assembled the back wall yet, but you can see the front above, with the addition of this piece I’m almost a third of the way to completing the building phase of this project.

Now that the Cathedral is starting to come together I’m beginning to wonder if I shouldn’t have ruined the towers more while building them as it’s going to be very hard to get figures in there during gaming! I’m also beginning to wonder how the heck I’m going to store this large, fragile and alarmingly heavy building once it’s completed…

I’ve mentioned Scrap Dragon in the past and noticed a small story pop up on Tabletop Gaming News recently about how they’ve started carrying Pig Iron Productions lines.

So I jumped onto Scrap Dragon to have a look. They have the entire PI line including all of the packs of sci-fi 28mm heads which are very tempting at $11.09nzd each. I might just have to pick up a pack of the Kolony Rebel heads as part of a long standing plan to scratch together a Necro Scavvie gang. The PI heads mix very well with Games Workshop plastics, which you can see showcased in their gallery.

While I was on there I also noticed Scrap Dragon have also started carrying Hirst Arts molds, Avatars of War figures and even some Forgeworld kits! Clearly I should visit here more often!