An A1 Mini requires a smaller nozzle, a customized profile, specific filament, and quite a bit of work in Blender and the slicer to successfully print 32mm figures (approx. 1/56 scale). Even those larger figures aren't anywhere as good as the quality of injection molding you get from a Games Workshop, Archon Studio, Wargames Atlantic or Bandai kit. You typically need an SLA printer for that - which requires PPE and ventilation due to the hazardous materials.
I don't think my A1 Mini would have success trying to print at 1/72 at the same detail as an injection molding process. I've done 28mm figures on it, but it was a lot of work and had a high failure rate.
A bit besides the point, but an FDM printer is definitely not good enough to reproduce these somewhat convincingly. That being said, a cheap-ish resin printer will probably do the job, and they are generally in the same price range.
Please don't resin print at home, especially if you have kids, unless you really know what you are doing. And by that I mean professional experience handling hazardous materials and provisioning a work environment for them.
The internet is rife with influencer content that makes these look OK and "not that dangerous", along with people who want to believe that rather than face buyer's remorse.
It's more dangerous than you think. It's messier than you think. The process steps are more ennui than you think. If you don't respect it you will make unsafe mistakes out of lack of knowledge, or impatience, or lazyness.
This shouldn't really be consumer gear. You can also fuck up on health and safety with FDM printers, but the default beginner lane (printing PLA in common colors) is a lot less risky on zero knowledge entry.
For hardcore army man enthusiasts, FDM printing will never satisfy their standards.
For my kids, swapping a 0.2mm nozzle into the printer, setting layer height to sub-0.1mm, and reducing print speed to 50% produces surprisingly good results.
Well you can get a roll of PLA for 10€, which is 1kg. I'm not sure how big these sets are but the material cost per unit is basically zero for things this small.
At 22mm scale the cost of filament is basically negligible (literally pennies), but yes, you would have to either buy STL files or make them yourself in Blender.
I did not know that this was a hobby for adults and I find it interesting that the one kid's toy if the other person's collectible. When I was in primary school in the late 70s we used to buy lots of 1/72 scale soldiers on second hand markets and had buckets full of them. Great battles were fought, and we lost lots of them, because we often played in the garden and we apparently were really good at camouflaging those tiny soldiers. For us they were just consumables, but it seems that we had the same Airfix soldiers that collectors buy today.
As a kid I had a bunch in this scale in the ‘90s, purchased in bags of something like 50-100 pieces each from an Everything’s-a-Dollar.
They were among my favorite toys for a long while (and so cheap!). Certainly my favorite “army men”. So detailed, so specific. So many poses. Their size meant a modest living room could host grand, complicated battles. Just great. I’d never seen them for sale since, but I guess that’s because they’d have been in hobbyist shops, not the toy aisle, ordinarily.
My experience is that a lot of dads are getting into these hobby at around the same time their kids are also the age for it. It's something to spend time with the family, as well as multiple families to do together.
Yeah, I would have assumed that the volumes purchased by kids outweighed collectors by a ton and so the peak would be in the late 90s to coincide with Toy Story 1 and 2
My guess is the vast majority of those were/are cheap, generic, Army Men types, usually clones of clones of some 1960's Airfix sculpts. You could buy those in large bags in toy stores in the 1980's and these days you can get literal buckets with hundreds of them online. Much cheaper than the hobby boxes.
I remember as a child I managed to convince my parents to buy a box or two of real Airfix figures in some hobby store, but the bulk of my old collection are generic no-name clones.
Regarding the 3D printing comment in the article: The cost to get started is no longer very high. A $200 A1 Mini with a $13 0.2mm nozzle can produce impressive detail. Example I found from a Google search: https://www.reddit.com/r/BambuLab/comments/195ehda/first_few...
The quality won’t satisfy the hardcore collectors but it’s good enough for kids to play with. The experience of printing them is fun too.
Interesting that this charts by _sets_, not total production volume.
I wonder what the market is like. I'm vaguely aware of Warhammer as a hobby, that's adjacent enough to my social media that I can "see" it, but not people buying miniatures. Does it sit adjacent to railway modelling? Are people making dioramas of Waterloo still?
.. a quick check reveals that OO is 1:76, so they wouldn't quite be right.
There are many 1:76 sets as well, even if 1:72 is more common.
Anecdotally, wargamers do not use those minis much. Some older gamers started out with playing more or less improvised wargames using 1:72 (mainly Airfix) figures in the 1960's or so, or playing games like Fewtherstone's wargames perhaps, but it is rare to see them now. Historical minis as a whole are less common now, but those that still play either use metal figures or figures from more wargame-specific companies (usually using more common game scales like 10mm, 15mm, or 28mm).
Most 1:72 ranges seen on that site (that I spent many hours on) are not that great for gaming. Lots of useless poses that are more for dioramas (or as kids toys maybe?). For gaming you need more just simple infantry walking or firing in some kind of good combat pose, but you often only get a handful of those in a set of 40+ figures, so it does not become very cost effective. Many poses look good, but not what you probably want to build armies for a tabletop.
1:76 is a very popular scale for model railways in the UK, so I wonder if they design figures for that audience, then paint them in fatigues to expand the market range.
The US preferred 1:87 historically. English 1:76 and American 1:87 trains run on the same size track, but the English models are typically built slightly over-size because their smaller bodies wouldn't fit a good motor easily.
This site isn't about Warhammer, that's an entirely separate hobby. Warhammer figures are much larger (around 1:56, but the characters are mostly superhumans and monsters, so in practice the figures are much larger) and there's more emphasis on stuff like painting and competitive play than diorama or realism.
That bugged me too; one set that sold a million copies in the 1950s counts for dramatically less than 100 sets that each sell ten thousand copies in 2007, even if they're precisely the same number of soldiers.
Of course the chart is bunk. It represents variety, not volume.
The author (and many others) assume that quality 3D printers are expensive, as a throwaway note in the last sentence.
A plastic soldier set is on the order of $20, and collectors will often purchase dozens.
A Bambu A1 mini (which is sufficient for the level of detail needed for these figurines) is about $200, which breaks even after 10 sets.
An A1 Mini requires a smaller nozzle, a customized profile, specific filament, and quite a bit of work in Blender and the slicer to successfully print 32mm figures (approx. 1/56 scale). Even those larger figures aren't anywhere as good as the quality of injection molding you get from a Games Workshop, Archon Studio, Wargames Atlantic or Bandai kit. You typically need an SLA printer for that - which requires PPE and ventilation due to the hazardous materials.
I don't think my A1 Mini would have success trying to print at 1/72 at the same detail as an injection molding process. I've done 28mm figures on it, but it was a lot of work and had a high failure rate.
more info: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7pBUk8AvJ8, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldkW5nXRXN4
Better comparison would be prices in various 3D printing sides.
But either way, margins for some companies like mentioned GW are huge
A bit besides the point, but an FDM printer is definitely not good enough to reproduce these somewhat convincingly. That being said, a cheap-ish resin printer will probably do the job, and they are generally in the same price range.
Please don't resin print at home, especially if you have kids, unless you really know what you are doing. And by that I mean professional experience handling hazardous materials and provisioning a work environment for them.
The internet is rife with influencer content that makes these look OK and "not that dangerous", along with people who want to believe that rather than face buyer's remorse.
It's more dangerous than you think. It's messier than you think. The process steps are more ennui than you think. If you don't respect it you will make unsafe mistakes out of lack of knowledge, or impatience, or lazyness.
This shouldn't really be consumer gear. You can also fuck up on health and safety with FDM printers, but the default beginner lane (printing PLA in common colors) is a lot less risky on zero knowledge entry.
2 replies →
For hardcore army man enthusiasts, FDM printing will never satisfy their standards.
For my kids, swapping a 0.2mm nozzle into the printer, setting layer height to sub-0.1mm, and reducing print speed to 50% produces surprisingly good results.
2 replies →
> A Bambu A1 mini (which is sufficient for the level of detail needed for these figurines) is about $200, which breaks even after 10 sets.
$200 for a printer does not break even at 10 sets if the sets are $20 unless the cost per unit printed is $0.
Also resin printer would be better comparison, far better for printing small detail models
Well you can get a roll of PLA for 10€, which is 1kg. I'm not sure how big these sets are but the material cost per unit is basically zero for things this small.
5 replies →
And time of the operator is $0 per hour as well
8 replies →
[dead]
Sorry to nitpick at your math, but the breakeven point will be (slightly) higher - factor in the plastic, electricity, and designs (plus any failures)
At 22mm scale the cost of filament is basically negligible (literally pennies), but yes, you would have to either buy STL files or make them yourself in Blender.
4 replies →
Need another napkin?
I did not know that this was a hobby for adults and I find it interesting that the one kid's toy if the other person's collectible. When I was in primary school in the late 70s we used to buy lots of 1/72 scale soldiers on second hand markets and had buckets full of them. Great battles were fought, and we lost lots of them, because we often played in the garden and we apparently were really good at camouflaging those tiny soldiers. For us they were just consumables, but it seems that we had the same Airfix soldiers that collectors buy today.
As a kid I had a bunch in this scale in the ‘90s, purchased in bags of something like 50-100 pieces each from an Everything’s-a-Dollar.
They were among my favorite toys for a long while (and so cheap!). Certainly my favorite “army men”. So detailed, so specific. So many poses. Their size meant a modest living room could host grand, complicated battles. Just great. I’d never seen them for sale since, but I guess that’s because they’d have been in hobbyist shops, not the toy aisle, ordinarily.
My experience is that a lot of dads are getting into these hobby at around the same time their kids are also the age for it. It's something to spend time with the family, as well as multiple families to do together.
Yeah, I would have assumed that the volumes purchased by kids outweighed collectors by a ton and so the peak would be in the late 90s to coincide with Toy Story 1 and 2
My guess is the vast majority of those were/are cheap, generic, Army Men types, usually clones of clones of some 1960's Airfix sculpts. You could buy those in large bags in toy stores in the 1980's and these days you can get literal buckets with hundreds of them online. Much cheaper than the hobby boxes.
I remember as a child I managed to convince my parents to buy a box or two of real Airfix figures in some hobby store, but the bulk of my old collection are generic no-name clones.
1 reply →
22mm is a lot smaller than the standard “green army men”.
3 replies →
Note that this is not Warhammer (and its competitors, like Warmachine). This is 22mm historical stuff, an entirely different genre.
Regarding the 3D printing comment in the article: The cost to get started is no longer very high. A $200 A1 Mini with a $13 0.2mm nozzle can produce impressive detail. Example I found from a Google search: https://www.reddit.com/r/BambuLab/comments/195ehda/first_few...
The quality won’t satisfy the hardcore collectors but it’s good enough for kids to play with. The experience of printing them is fun too.
Interesting that this charts by _sets_, not total production volume.
I wonder what the market is like. I'm vaguely aware of Warhammer as a hobby, that's adjacent enough to my social media that I can "see" it, but not people buying miniatures. Does it sit adjacent to railway modelling? Are people making dioramas of Waterloo still?
.. a quick check reveals that OO is 1:76, so they wouldn't quite be right.
There are many 1:76 sets as well, even if 1:72 is more common.
Anecdotally, wargamers do not use those minis much. Some older gamers started out with playing more or less improvised wargames using 1:72 (mainly Airfix) figures in the 1960's or so, or playing games like Fewtherstone's wargames perhaps, but it is rare to see them now. Historical minis as a whole are less common now, but those that still play either use metal figures or figures from more wargame-specific companies (usually using more common game scales like 10mm, 15mm, or 28mm).
Most 1:72 ranges seen on that site (that I spent many hours on) are not that great for gaming. Lots of useless poses that are more for dioramas (or as kids toys maybe?). For gaming you need more just simple infantry walking or firing in some kind of good combat pose, but you often only get a handful of those in a set of 40+ figures, so it does not become very cost effective. Many poses look good, but not what you probably want to build armies for a tabletop.
1:76 is a very popular scale for model railways in the UK, so I wonder if they design figures for that audience, then paint them in fatigues to expand the market range.
The US preferred 1:87 historically. English 1:76 and American 1:87 trains run on the same size track, but the English models are typically built slightly over-size because their smaller bodies wouldn't fit a good motor easily.
This site isn't about Warhammer, that's an entirely separate hobby. Warhammer figures are much larger (around 1:56, but the characters are mostly superhumans and monsters, so in practice the figures are much larger) and there's more emphasis on stuff like painting and competitive play than diorama or realism.
This site is about "historic" stuff only. No Fantasy or SciFi, thus no Warhammer.
If you want to this historic wargaming hobby in action: https://www.youtube.com/@LittleWarsTV
1:72 means to shrink 6 ft into 1 inch.
That bugged me too; one set that sold a million copies in the 1950s counts for dramatically less than 100 sets that each sell ten thousand copies in 2007, even if they're precisely the same number of soldiers.
Of course the chart is bunk. It represents variety, not volume.
Where? World?
Chart unsigned? (I think number of sets issued, but you can produce 100m soldiers in 5 sets and 1m in 500 sets...)
Website does not work on mobile..
[flagged]