Two of my winning bids on Ebay arrived today, one for rhino doors, and the other for storm shields. Both orders appear to be fakes. A couple of things make me think this. First, the resin is more brittle than other FW models I have. (I have a lot of FW, so I have seen everything!) Second, the pieces are oily, and have muted detail and lack of density. Although muted, the detail is better than what I have gotten on my own castings of my bases, so it would seem this is from some pseudo professional service. Now I don't know for certain that these are forgeries, but they are off just enough for me to doubt them.
Had I suspected these were forgeries, I would not have bought them. I've been avoiding purchasing any FW stuff from any seller in Russia for this reason. The other thing that made these seem real was that the prices were good but not awesome.
So what do I do now? Should I dump these? Should I mail them off to FW, so they can be reviewed? I could just paint them up.
Any suggestions?
I've seen casts like that before, from a company in china that was mentioned on BoLS a while back.
ReplyDeleteTo be honest? FW knows about them. Sending them there is not going to solve anything.
Up to you whether or not you feel "morally" obligated to dump them or not. If you are buying on eBay, the money wasn't going to FW anyway.
I'd paint them and call it a lesson learned. Either buy exclusively from the FW website or decide that you run that risk. There's a LOT of recasts on eBay, some better some worse. I suspect (given the casting quality i've received from FW on occasion) I wouldn't be able to tell at all "for sure" if the resin wasn't different.
You could contact GW and see if they're interested in you sending them some sort of evidence package, otherwise I'd just use them.
ReplyDeleteTo be honest, the last batch of stuff I got from FW directly had muted detail and was oily as all hell, so they could be legit.
ReplyDeleteThe harder, more brittle resin may be the give away though - the stuff FW uses tends to be almost like limp pizza compared to the resin that most fine scale/historical miniature companies use, and is a damned sight softer than what Banelegions uses as well.
I just checked an my Helbrect model is also coming from China. I was hoping to just get an old metal model. Who knows what this one will be.
ReplyDelete