Not Flash Gordon. Or opening your overcoat to expose your shrivelled baby-maker. No, the flash that drives a lot of wargamers to distraction is the bits of metal left over from the casting that escaped from the mold - and which (together with mold lines) you now have to spend 15 hours removing before event considering painting your miniatures.
Flash comes in many forms. For smaller figures (especially 6mm) it can be hard to differentiate what is flash and what is model. I once painted the cloak between the legs of a line of figures only to find (when I turned them around) that they weren't wearing cloaks - it was a whole flap of flash between the legs.
This means painstaking time poking really small files through the flap and grinding away - which can lead to mishaps (like tonight when a hoplite was severed at the knees as I tried to get a chunk of flash off. Often its in obvious places and the big frustration comes when you've primed a load of figures THEN found flash on them.
And that's the problem with flash - you can't just ignore it. 28mm. 15m, 6mm - regardless of scale, you can't leave it on. For 6mm spears it looks like they're holding 8' feather dusters or have not just webbed feet but webbed legs. If you paint flash it looks crap ("Why has he got a flag coming out of his helmet?") so if you have any pride, you HAVE to file it off.
So you have to sit there, patiently grinding away with tiny files - leaving metal filings all over the new sofa (yeah - she LOVED that!) when you'd rather spend the time actually painting.
Some manufacturers are worse than others. Rapier produce nice figures but most have some bit of flash on them. H&R and Baccus much less so. The outright winner for me though has been Irregular - where I found a normal file wasn't enough. Instead I had to pull out the old Dremel to grind down 5mm of flash from the base - then try to work out what on the figures was flash and what was naginata blade and armour.
That's the other problem with 6mm - with big chunks of flash you can find yourself filing away the actual figure detail ('He didn't need that shield anyway"). But regardless, it has to come off - and many hours are spent in this boring and thankless task.
So - flash. Welcome to the Bugbear list!
Flash comes in many forms. For smaller figures (especially 6mm) it can be hard to differentiate what is flash and what is model. I once painted the cloak between the legs of a line of figures only to find (when I turned them around) that they weren't wearing cloaks - it was a whole flap of flash between the legs.
This means painstaking time poking really small files through the flap and grinding away - which can lead to mishaps (like tonight when a hoplite was severed at the knees as I tried to get a chunk of flash off. Often its in obvious places and the big frustration comes when you've primed a load of figures THEN found flash on them.
And that's the problem with flash - you can't just ignore it. 28mm. 15m, 6mm - regardless of scale, you can't leave it on. For 6mm spears it looks like they're holding 8' feather dusters or have not just webbed feet but webbed legs. If you paint flash it looks crap ("Why has he got a flag coming out of his helmet?") so if you have any pride, you HAVE to file it off.
So you have to sit there, patiently grinding away with tiny files - leaving metal filings all over the new sofa (yeah - she LOVED that!) when you'd rather spend the time actually painting.
Some manufacturers are worse than others. Rapier produce nice figures but most have some bit of flash on them. H&R and Baccus much less so. The outright winner for me though has been Irregular - where I found a normal file wasn't enough. Instead I had to pull out the old Dremel to grind down 5mm of flash from the base - then try to work out what on the figures was flash and what was naginata blade and armour.
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| I get some help with my Irregular samurai |
So - flash. Welcome to the Bugbear list!