Resin Overhaul: WIP Wednesday

Brace yourselves for a look into the TTCombat warehouse in today’s WIP Wednesday!

Hello everyone! And welcome to another WIP Wed, with a slightly different flavour this week.

Keen-eyed TTCombat fans amongst you will have noticed that a lot of resin kits are out of stock on the TTCombat webstore at the moment.

The reason is simple: we haven’t been able to make things fast enough!

Over the last couple of years, our resin department has grown a little! It used to be a couple of people who poured in the morning, made moulds at midday, and then demoulded in the afternoon. Now we have a whole team for each of those jobs!

However, with the growing team and growing demand, our production methods have needed to change to accommodate. In the last few months we’ve completely overhauled the resin production schedule, which should hopefully help with that!

Here you can see the new layout of the pouring room. The mould run before was getting rather unwieldy. We added new moulds to the run with each release (the run is what we call all the moulds that need to be made at one time).

The run ended up being very big, but only producing a handful of each miniature each time we poured. Lots of variation, but not much focus!

We’ve overhauled the system so the runs are shorter with more identical moulds in each. We can run them more times per day, and make more of each model.

There are now three vac-chambers in the mould room, which is enough to use on every single miniature, not just the problematic ones. Overall that means fewer bubbles, better resin mix, and more consistency in quality of models.

We’ve split our team between resin mixing, silicone making, pouring, and de-moulding, and we’ve changed our shift patterns as well. That means each member of staff is more focused on one station and we will produce higher quantity miniatures.

How many more? Well we’re using up our resin four times faster than previously. It’s so fast that we’ve expedited our resin delivery. The picture above shows just the resin delivered this week. More is coming next week!

With these changes, the assembly team is now able to make a huge amount more of each kit at one time. That means production is scaling up, and when kits are back in stock, there will be literally hundreds of each in the warehouse at any one time.

We’ve had more things out of stock recently because the run is smaller in variance. Concentrating on the best-sellers and then working down, we’ll have more things coming into stock week after week. And due to the quantities we’re making, they’re unlikely to run out any time soon. After we iron out the initial teething troubles of changing to this system in the coming weeks, it should be smooth sailing from there.

Looks like the Pulcinella Pub Crawl box to me!

The tray above shows just a small amount of the parts being made at a time. We’ve actually had to design bigger and sturdier trays to house the resin pieces! That’s one of the useful things about having a laser cutting suite on-site – custom-made storage solutions!

With this new method of production, we’ve made the decision to focus on restocks rather than new releases. We’d rather have everything in stock than just the new releases, so we’re pausing new resin releases. We still have new MDF kits coming out every week though!

We’re hoping to be caught up on everything very shortly. That’s not to say we definitely won’t have any more new releases this year. Salute is just around the corner after all, and there’s a chance we’ll have some pre-releases with us.

We’ll also have the new Black Friday and Cyber Monday miniatures heading your way in November. As well as the full list of exclusives up for sale during that period too.

After we’re up and running and everything’s in stock, we’ll have loads of new releases to keep everyone’s wallets crying. Blood on the Water, Dropzone Battlegroup Boxes (and Behemoths), a furry new RUMBLESLAM team, and some rather speedy Dropfleet ships are all just around the corner.

In the meantime, the best place to see what’s come back into stock is on the TTCombat webstore. We’re restocking new things all the time. And (unlike that pesky Ppiñama), they’ll stay in stock once they’re there.