For the past couple of years we have been breaking our figure listings into two broad categories: Active & Inactive. This has helped to highlight those ranges that are increasingly difficult to cast; requiring new molds or just a longer time to produce.
This differentiation has helped to set expectations for casting and delivery times. However, the time has come to retire some of the Classic (Scruby) ranges. Over the next few months you will see a shift to the new classifications : Active and Retired. What this means is that we will remove figure listings for retired ranges. We do hope that the figures won’t remain in retired status forever as we would truly love to return all the classic (Scruby) miniatures to production status.
For the war game sized figures (N-Gauge through 30mm) we are looking at how best to return retired figures to the active status. Thoughts include usage of Crowdsourcing to support new molds. We would also be interested in sponsors for various ranges (this might be something for an individual, group or club that wants to build war game armies or just collections of figures); we are not sure exactly how that would work, but it would be similar to crowdfunding, but by an individual or small group.
For the large sized figures (40mm & 54mm) crowdfunding looks like a good possibility. Funds required to return figures to production status are much smaller. We can do these in smaller batches, a mold or two at a time.
All said, there are some figures that may never be returned to production. In some cases there are no masters or pattern molds (and production molds are worn out). In other cases, the figures were designed for multi-part drop casting molds and do not lend themselves well to production in centrifugal molds.
We will keep you up-to-date with our progress. If you have ranges you would like too see returned to production, let us know; we can use all the help we can get to determine priorities.