Hello everyone!

Whilst cutting a Ranger of the North in half this morning - as you do - I began to wonder if it would be possible to melt down bits and pieces of old metal GW figures and reuse them to cast new, homemade minis.

Obviously, you'd need quite a few mangled torsos or discarded legs to provide enough metal for a batch of figures... But chemically speaking, it should work, shouldn't it? Has anybody ever tried this before?

Thanks!

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Manners maketh man

Thanks Quendil! Am completely new to home-casting, hadn't thought of that. I'm still a long way off from casting my own figs anyway...

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Manners maketh man

Well I have no idea what this hobby casting stuff is but since I'm a chemist I think I can tell you what I know.

Well first of all the metal minis in wargames are usually made from lead a common material so you don't need other torsos and legs.
The first thing that pops in my mind if you want to aquire some amount of lead is the weights that are used for fishing and they are very cheap.

Now the white-ish colour GW minis have is because they use some other metals to make lead alloys like antimony, cadmium, tin(I don't know exactly which metals GW is using but these are a good example) that give this lighter colour to the mini but the fumes of these metals can be toxic if inhaled so I would suggest to do all the procedure in a well ventilated area.

After doing a quick research I found out that GW is not using anymore lead because " of concerns about lead poisoning particularly in children" so my guess is that they use tin alloys which is better because tin has less melting point than lead which means that you can melt is with a simple torch(don't know if you have in UK something like a torch which is used to boil water for tea of coffe instead of the kitchen I don't know it's name)

You can use green stuff as a mold since it's a two material epoxy adhesive and my guess is that it can withstand the temperature of the molten lead or tin if you pour it in.

And one last thing is that you have to use the same materials(if you choose the metal leftovers or metals found in merchandise) because they have different purity (not density) and they might not mix well.

Of course all these are theoretical knowledge I haven't tried any of these myself so I can't be 100% sure.
Just hope if you try it everything to go well and tell us the results.

ahh AND ALWAYS WEAR PROTECTIVE GLASSES