New Reaper Bones Miniatures

[Chief Lackey Rich]

Original white Bones is terrible and Reaper should feel bad....

It's fine on a limited range of subjects, eg big, chunky, high-volume sculpts without a ton of fine surface detail.  A lot of terrain, for ex, and big monsters that would be prohibitively expensive in other materials.  It sucks on most human-sized stuff, anything with small, bendy bits, and ye gods it's bad at hair and fur and many faces.

Would be nice if they'd transfer some of the more problematic figs to Black or the new USA material, though.

...They did and came out with Bones Black which is much, much better.

Granted, although it's still not a joy to clean mold lines on and some (maybe all?) of the multi-part kits come pre-assembled and often need gap filling.

The newer USA stuff seems even better to me, although it's not quite as firm.  The fact that it isn't made in China's kind of a big plus in my book, anyway.

Metal is still superior.

For some things, sure.  At least Reaper didn't pull a GW on us and just drop casting metal overnight.  They're even still releasing new figs, although the rate they add to the metal ranges has dropped dramatically from the pre-Bones days.

[Calimero]

...
Would be nice if they'd transfer some of the more problematic figs to Black or the new USA material, though.

Indeed... but, apparently the different kind of “Bones” materials aren’t made on the same injection machines

Granted, although it's still not a joy to clean mold lines on and some (maybe all?) of the multi-part kits come pre-assembled and often need gap filling.

I also think it’s a problem. They should leave the consumer assemble the models himself/herself. It was particularly true for the firsts KS Bones figures. I encounter the same problem with Mantic Terrain Crate II. Some of the pieces have been glued together without being thoroughly cleaned first. This give all kinds of bent or crooked models

...

[Chief Lackey Rich]

Yeah, the different production techniques involved make it unlikely that we'll see most Bones White figs getting remade into Black or USA - but one can hope some of them sell well enough to justify making new molds for better materials.

Mantic's done the pre-assembly stuff on some other figs as well, eg the Nameless Ogres, and they're prone to poor assembly as well.  Very off-putting, especially if you were planning on doing conversions in the first place.  I groused about that a few years back over here:

https://brokenstarsburningships.blogspot.com/2018/12/dreadful-things-mantic-star-saga.html

Of course, you're seeing it more and more often from WizKids too, and while they're better about QC they're still far from perfect.  Most multipart figs from them need at least some gap filling, although at least they aren't glued on their bases - which are often too small to look right due to them sticking to D&D-dictated sizes.

[Mammoth miniatures]

For some things, sure.  At least Reaper didn't pull a GW on us and just drop casting metal overnight.  They're even still releasing new figs, although the rate they add to the metal ranges has dropped dramatically from the pre-Bones days.

Given the price of casting metal at the moment it makes sense that reaper are trying to perfect bones instead.

[BZ]

This week I recieved my first Bones USA miniature, and Im impressed! Beautiful sharp details, and its much easier to clean up mold lines (there are some really visible ones, even if the tool should be new I think). Its a harder, more brittle material (mine was damaged a little bit), almost like some softer resin. Overall, its a great development from Reaper!