Games Workshop Rapid Prototyping

CNC Milled Tyranid Claw Here’s an interesting trade article about the systems Games Workhop are now using for rapidly creating their new plastic figure lines. Gone are the day of ‘3 ups’ and pantograph machines.

I assume they’re still using the old fashioned sculpt and vulcanized mold system for metals but who knows?

There’s some interesting tidbits in there too, like the fact that GW used to produce 60 ‘tools’ (ie. new molds) a year but now they’re looking at 100 ‘tools’ a year with the new system. I assume this means we’ll see a lot more plastic regiment boxes in the future. Apparently they also run the plastic molding process ‘almost 24 hours, 365 days a year’.

As a gamer it’ll be very interesting to see what their sprues look like in several years once GW are old hands at this method. I haven’t been that impressed with the newer sprues (eg. Dwarf Warriors) because of their limited poses and loss of some detail on some surfaces which is presumably a side effect of this newer method.

Article spotted on The Darkwing.

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