Recycling Metal

[armchairgeneral]

Every since the days of Prince August where I cast my own figures, I have got into the habit of collecting scraps and flash from cleaning up metal figures together with offcuts of figures used for conversions and the odd unwanted figure not really saleable.

I periodically give this metal to a friend who casts his own figures as I have long since stopped doing Prince August casting. I haven’t been in touch with this friend for a while now so wondered if it was worth bringing to a show if any manufacturers can use it? My current bag of metal weighs about half a kg.

[vodkafan]

I do the same. My bits of useless lead  now fills a large sandwich tub and weighs about 4 kg.

[armchairgeneral]

I do the same. My bits of useless lead  now fills a large sandwich tub and weighs about 4 kg.

So what do you plan to do with it?

[katie]

Ainsty Castings will take metal for recycling into more figures.

[Daeothar]

I myself have been collecting the tabs from slottafigures and metal sprues for years, but I've never come to the ungodly weight of 4 Kg! In fact, I've only got about 1/3 of a small plastic drawer in my 'bits wall' in almost 30 years of miniature painting...

Originally, I saved it all up because I thought I could use it when I would finally come around to casting my own minis. Which never came to pass, obviously.

But I have found a new use for them; weighing down bases. I tend to use washers as bases for a lot of projects these days, but there remains a sizable portion of miniatures that is based on plastic (slotta) bases.

And with some of the more expressive posing out there these days, it's often desirable to weigh down the bases as much as possible, so I glue those cut off slotta tabs to the bottom of the bases, which works really well.

In fact, I am painting a group of over 40 minis right now, that have all been weighed down in this fashion. They are plastics, but for the right heft, I even weighed down the ones that had no balancing issues...

So, if you can't get rid of your excess weight, just distribute it to your minis

[Cait Sidhe]

To be honest it will depend, most casters won't just take any random metal to re-use as it won't match the alloy/mix they're using. If you already have casting equipment from doing Prince August stuff you could make your own moulds for simple things like metal rocks and such. Not sure what kind of material you would need to survive molten metal casting... some kind of rubber I guess as opposed to silicone.

[MartinD]

I keep some of the long metal sprue bits that Warlord have in their metal kits for potential rubble on bases. I think I've only used about two bits ever anyway. but I just think they come in useful at some point.

[armchairgeneral]

If it can’t be reused for casting figures I wondered about melting it down for weighting bases for trees and “flying” bases. It is just the practicalities of doing it.

A thin MDF base with a further edging “washer” on top might work that you could pour the metal in to? Then you still have the problem of how to fix the tree or shaft for the flying figure in place until the metal cools. With the latter being plastic you would have to also protect it from the heat in some way. Is it worth all the aggravation 

[Silent Invader]

It’s actually relatively easy (risks of hot metal and lead aside  ). Seriously though, there are inherent dangers in doing this.

The attached image has its flying base made from redundant minis. I just heated the metal in a large spoon and the poured it onto the inside of a metal biscuit tin lid. I ended up with ‘plops’ of metal that when cooled broke away from the flimsy metal of the lid. (You can see one on the bottom left of the first image). I then super-glued an interestingly arranged mound  of the cooled ‘plops’ to a sheet of paper then sand over the top. However before adding the sand I did drill a hole and fit a plastic tube that would act as the socket for the flight rod.

[armchairgeneral]

Thanks for that post. Impressive model and painting. I have done a fair bit of Prince August casting in the past so not too worried about dealing with the molten metal.

Your use of it is great for models of that size. I was thinking of the application to smaller bases. Maybe one could do smaller plops and arrange them on a base and filler over them all.

[dbsubashi]

I use the metal sprue bits as shaker “balls” in my paint bottles. I cut them into chunks small enough to fit through the neck (more important with dropper style bottle than GW bottles!)

[Silent Invader]

Thanks for that post. Impressive model and painting. I have done a fair bit of Prince August casting in the past so not too worried about dealing with the molten metal.

Your use of it is great for models of that size. I was thinking of the application to smaller bases. Maybe one could do smaller plops and arrange them on a base and filler over them all.

Thanks and yes I’ve done similar for smaller flight bases.