Hi guys,
I’m a regular on the Canada Toy Soldier club forum but I finally decided to sign up over here just to post in this thread because this issue is so important to me and I want to make sure people in the toy soldier industry read it!
Since I’m younger than most posters on this forum, maybe my eyes are a little better. Or maybe my personality is a little more picky/discerning (for financial reasons I have to be). Or maybe I’m just really unlucky at receiving lemon sets… but I seem to notice quality control issues that apparently don’t phase that many others on the forums. Until this thread I haven’t seen anyone talk much about the disappointment you feel when you open a brand new set of figures only to discover a bent rifle, shovel, or paint missing from small areas of a figure so the silver shows through.
I have come to call it “The 3Ps of Poor Quality”: “Paint”, “Packaging” and “Polystone”. These are things every manufacturer in this industry needs to pay attention to.
First comes paint: I’ve found small painting irregularities or tiny spots of paint missing from figures that are fresh from the box, so some of these quality control mistakes are being made right at the factory. When silver glints from a figure, even from a small spot, it seriously compromises its aesthetic value by reminding you that you are not looking at a miniature soldier but instead just a metal facsimile. Andy, if for cost reasons you must focus on only one area, make sure the faces of your figures are free from different coloured marks, sloppy excess paint lines, paint cracks, and most importantly silver spots.
Next comes packaging: Most companies use pre-cut foam but I can tell you it’s just not working well enough. Just to concur with other’s observations, my MK-015(S) dealer special Crusader also arrived with a bent axe. Upon bending it straight there was paint loss – luckily it was only on the axe handle so it looks like part of the weapon. But such defects are hardly confined to the Crusader line alone, or K&C for that matter.
From my experiences I’m fairly certain that some figures are damaged at the factory when they’re packing them – I think the workers sometimes shove the figures into foam which isn’t cut properly and voila – bending occurs. I frankly can’t understand why toy soldier companies seem incapable of inventing packaging that doesn’t damage their own products, and ensures they can survive the gauntlet of the postal system. I’m not saying plastic blisters are any better – I’ve had Del Prado and Altaya/Frontline figures arrive with heavy paint loss due to banging around inside the bubble. So far I’ve found Figarti does the best job of packing their figure sets (on the other hand, their Japanese howitzer and tiger tank, while very well packed, still managed to arrived somewhat damaged).
Finally comes polystone. I read that K&C introduced polystone to this hobby – I very much wish they had not. Polystone is extremely heavy, brittle and unable to hold the fine details that plastic and metal can. The only reason K&C vehicles are so nice is because they’re painted so well, in spite of the cheap material used. No working treads or hatches (like 21st Century/Forces of Valour vehicles) – just a lump of painted stone. The only advantage of polystone as far as I can discern is that it’s much cheaper than plastic or metal for the manufacturer to produce in limited runs yet its heaviness deceptively conveys the feeling that it must be valuable and well made. I can only think that early on many collectors mistook K&C’s excellently painted vehicles for metal which allowed polystone to get a foothold in this hobby. Thanks to polystone we end up with tanks and artillery pieces with barrels that curve at odd angles, among other problems.
I’ll give two examples of poor K&C polystone pieces. My “beautifully executed winter Kettenrad” (in Louis’ words) is not particularly well executed at all. The top-mounted tubing superstructure is warped out of shape. I sent for a replacement kettenkrad but its tube rollcage was bent a different way and there was a spot of black paint right on the nose of the driver. Likewise, the K&C 8th Army 25lb field gun is seriously lacking in fine details (such as elevation cranks). It looks, as befits the name polystone, like a piece of soapstone carved to resemble the artillery piece rather than a scale representation of the real thing. I understand the 25 pounder was an earlier K&C mould but I wonder whether any of the newer guns are really any better given the detail limitations of polystone (and the propensity for warped barrels). The W. Britains 25 pounder, also polystone, is no better.
Now some might say these 3 inconsistencies in quality are meant to differentiate toy soldier products from mass-produced figures (e.g. the slogan in this hobby “bent but not broken”). On the contrary, I think that hand-made figures should be of a higher quality because each piece is inspected by human artisans. Certainly the price is high enough to warrant superb quality ($100 = the entire monthly budget of many people in sub-saharan Africa).
The previous observations should not be viewed in any way as a slam against K&C as these problems afflict every manufacturer my father and I have purchased from: King & Country, Britains, New Model Army, Figarti, East of India, Conte, Del Prado, Altaya (sold through Frontline), Monarch Regalia, and various other glossy brands. Rather, my desire is simply to help improve the quality of this wonderful toy soldier hobby.
Defects like this wouldn’t be tolerated so much in the 1/6 action figure hobby which I have long been involved in. Forum members in that hobby are all over such problems when they find them, and believe me, they are not nice to the manufacturers that suffer from them.
Andy, if you want to attract new customers from other hobbies, you have to step up on this issue. If you want to call yourself the best in the industry, which I agree K&C is at the moment, please make sure your quality control also tops everyone else.
Thank you.
