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.
Well said. I’m often nonplussed at these calculations of some fairly high hourly rate that we seemingly all should be able to command at will at anytime in unlimited supply. Well, I can’t.
If you would otherwise be doing anything with positive expected utility in that time, the opportunity cost is >$0.
The fact that the analysis can be carried out in monetary units (because we don't have a good direct measure of utility) doesn't mean that receiving money itself is the only source of utility that needs to be considered.
Most of the time my time spend operating my A1 Mini is... maybe 2-3 minutes per plate? Drag and drop into Bambu Studio, run the slicer, send the job to the printer, come back in 4 hours and grab my prints. I might need to break off the supports and clean them up - but with an injection molded kit I'd be snipping the sprues, cleaning up mold lines with a knife and gluing the models together anyway.
The commericial overhead rate for an SLA printer is about $5 a plate - the washing and curing steps can be largely automated, or even if they are done manually, it's not that much work.
People who 3D print as a hobby often derive enjoyment from time spent on the printing process. It’s another layer of hobby on top of the hobbies you’re printing
Yeah a lot of my friends legitimately enjoy the art of making or modifying models in Blender, and the science of testing different print profiles, materials and processes.
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.
Valid question if you haven’t been in 3D printing. Also depends heavily on the country.
In the US, it’s common to get quality generic PLA for $15 per kg. Buy several spools at once in a package deal and the price can fall to $11-12 per kg. Wait for a sale and buy a 10-pack and I’ve been getting PLA under $10 per kg. It’s very cheap.
For toys I’d prefer to spend a little more on PLA Pro or Plus, which means it has modifiers added for better impact resistance. This helps a lot with small toys I print for the kids.
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.
I agree. Kids or animals. Specially dogs that are mindless brutes.
I've been 3d printing with resin for a long time before I had my dog. Now I don't do it, unless I can be sure that I can have the dog out my printing room for several days straight, for the water-washable resin to solidify on the sun after usage, and all the different after-print steps that have to be taken care of.
It's also annoying to clean the plate, and deal with the resin bottles when you stop using them. There's no easily accessible infrastructure to dispose of the waste from the printing process so if you become lazy, you end up creating toxic hazards for anyone in the community. Not a good outcome at all.
Still, safe 3d printing brings me a lot of joy, specially to prepare board games sessions with friends and neighbours. Printing, painting, etc. You just have to be responsible and civic and do the right thing.
There's a safe way to handle this stuff, but you have to be very disciplined about it. Animals and kids complicate that big time.
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.
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.
> At 22mm scale the cost of filament is basically negligible (literally pennies)
Even assuming no losses, just by volume, something like $0.10 per figure, and packs of 1/72 scale figures that retail for $20 are often a 20-50 figures.
Most people I know buy STL files from MyMiniFactory because the cost of the STLs is already a tiny fraction of the price of buying models at the local store. We spend more on the paint to paint the figures than we do on the digital files. We also like supporting the artists - they often have cheap subscription based models where you get access new files, plus their back catalog if you stay subscribed for a certain period of time or at certain tiers.
Often the artists are solo artists that you can, like, hang out with on Discord and chat directly with.
The exception might be Russia, there's a big 40K hobby there and they're cut off from buying stuff due to sanctions and the terrible state of the economy.
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.
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.
Army men came in various sizes, and one of the most common one was always close to 1:72, or at least that has been the case since the 1980's.
I remember one of my friends had larger, maybe 40mm army men, but my collection was only the smaller size ~1:72/22mm. Same sculpts and colors. Various random no name toy brands.
The green army men of Toy Story and (for example) the Army Men video games were (searches) 1:35. The ones that were that shade of green (or a particular shade of tan—gotta have the other side) and in those poses with those exact sculpts, that every toy aisle or toy store had (in the ‘80s and ‘90s, in the US) even if they did also have others.
Can’t edit, so self-reply: the legitimate current producer of this style appears to be called “timmee toys” and a search turns up a whole bunch of exactly the army men of that type, plus a ton of vehicles and such made from the same type of plastic that look familiar from decades past.
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 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
And time of the operator is $0 per hour as well
Which it is. Unless you would actually be getting paid for that time (which you wouldn't in most cases), the opportunity cost is $0.
Well said. I’m often nonplussed at these calculations of some fairly high hourly rate that we seemingly all should be able to command at will at anytime in unlimited supply. Well, I can’t.
You get paid in happiness of having and doing a hobby that brings peace and joy :))
If you would otherwise be doing anything with positive expected utility in that time, the opportunity cost is >$0.
The fact that the analysis can be carried out in monetary units (because we don't have a good direct measure of utility) doesn't mean that receiving money itself is the only source of utility that needs to be considered.
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Most of the time my time spend operating my A1 Mini is... maybe 2-3 minutes per plate? Drag and drop into Bambu Studio, run the slicer, send the job to the printer, come back in 4 hours and grab my prints. I might need to break off the supports and clean them up - but with an injection molded kit I'd be snipping the sprues, cleaning up mold lines with a knife and gluing the models together anyway.
The commericial overhead rate for an SLA printer is about $5 a plate - the washing and curing steps can be largely automated, or even if they are done manually, it's not that much work.
People who 3D print as a hobby often derive enjoyment from time spent on the printing process. It’s another layer of hobby on top of the hobbies you’re printing
Yeah a lot of my friends legitimately enjoy the art of making or modifying models in Blender, and the science of testing different print profiles, materials and processes.
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.
Where? I see them for 30-40.
Valid question if you haven’t been in 3D printing. Also depends heavily on the country.
In the US, it’s common to get quality generic PLA for $15 per kg. Buy several spools at once in a package deal and the price can fall to $11-12 per kg. Wait for a sale and buy a 10-pack and I’ve been getting PLA under $10 per kg. It’s very cheap.
For toys I’d prefer to spend a little more on PLA Pro or Plus, which means it has modifiers added for better impact resistance. This helps a lot with small toys I print for the kids.
I can easily find 4kg for $40-45 online, or if I am patient I can grab 1kg for $10-12 on sale.
You may be looking at more advanced materials like carbon fiber or fiberglass reinforced filament for printing larger parts that take a load/stress.
All I had to do was search "PLA filament" on Amazon and results started at $11USD
2kg packs on Amazon that go for around $20, eSun and similar.
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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.
I agree. Kids or animals. Specially dogs that are mindless brutes.
I've been 3d printing with resin for a long time before I had my dog. Now I don't do it, unless I can be sure that I can have the dog out my printing room for several days straight, for the water-washable resin to solidify on the sun after usage, and all the different after-print steps that have to be taken care of.
It's also annoying to clean the plate, and deal with the resin bottles when you stop using them. There's no easily accessible infrastructure to dispose of the waste from the printing process so if you become lazy, you end up creating toxic hazards for anyone in the community. Not a good outcome at all.
Still, safe 3d printing brings me a lot of joy, specially to prepare board games sessions with friends and neighbours. Printing, painting, etc. You just have to be responsible and civic and do the right thing.
There's a safe way to handle this stuff, but you have to be very disciplined about it. Animals and kids complicate that big time.
Agree, I cant believe the lax safety approach. The smell alone trigger my WARNING DANGER synapses.
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.
Also great for casual players, or printing basic models to playtest with before committing to purchasing a higher quality model or print.
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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.
> At 22mm scale the cost of filament is basically negligible (literally pennies)
Even assuming no losses, just by volume, something like $0.10 per figure, and packs of 1/72 scale figures that retail for $20 are often a 20-50 figures.
0.10 per figure is a order of magnitude+ overestimate. The paint will cost significantly more than the plastic.
If someone is printing their own rather than buying official models I don't think it's safe to assume they're buying the digital assets
Most people I know buy STL files from MyMiniFactory because the cost of the STLs is already a tiny fraction of the price of buying models at the local store. We spend more on the paint to paint the figures than we do on the digital files. We also like supporting the artists - they often have cheap subscription based models where you get access new files, plus their back catalog if you stay subscribed for a certain period of time or at certain tiers.
Often the artists are solo artists that you can, like, hang out with on Discord and chat directly with.
The exception might be Russia, there's a big 40K hobby there and they're cut off from buying stuff due to sanctions and the terrible state of the economy.
Need another napkin?
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
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.
1:72 means to shrink 6 ft into 1 inch.
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.
I was allowed one set as a kid and chose this to pose with my 1:72 Spitfire & Hurricane.
https://plasticsoldierreview.com/Review.aspx?id=46
22mm is a lot smaller than the standard “green army men”.
Army men came in various sizes, and one of the most common one was always close to 1:72, or at least that has been the case since the 1980's.
I remember one of my friends had larger, maybe 40mm army men, but my collection was only the smaller size ~1:72/22mm. Same sculpts and colors. Various random no name toy brands.
The green army men of Toy Story and (for example) the Army Men video games were (searches) 1:35. The ones that were that shade of green (or a particular shade of tan—gotta have the other side) and in those poses with those exact sculpts, that every toy aisle or toy store had (in the ‘80s and ‘90s, in the US) even if they did also have others.
Can’t edit, so self-reply: the legitimate current producer of this style appears to be called “timmee toys” and a search turns up a whole bunch of exactly the army men of that type, plus a ton of vehicles and such made from the same type of plastic that look familiar from decades past.
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..
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