Christmas Holidays

So the sale is all over for another year – this time we’ve been unusually efficient with turning orders around, although there are still a few remaining that came in on Thursday and Friday for me to mop up this week. However, all sale orders should ship by Christmas barring anything unforeseen.

I’m at the workshop for the first half of this week and will continue to process any new orders as they come in. The last posting date for all overseas destinations has gone, so although I will still post out orders, don’t expect to see them until well after Christmas now. The exception is UK orders – I will endeavour to get all remaining sale orders for the UK posted before last post (Wednesday), but anything else will probably not make it for Christmas Day.

The website will remain open as always, but we’re taking next week off, so any orders placed after the middle of this week will have to wait until the New Year. Once the sale orders have gone I’ll be concentrating on admin, some maintenance and tidying around the workshop, and hopefully some design work on new items. I’ll return to the workshop on Tuesday January 3rd after the New Year bank holiday.

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One !

This is is – the final day of our Christmas sale. You really are in the last-chance saloon now. The sale ends at midnight GMT tonight (December 16th) – so 18 hours from when this post is published.

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Two…

This is the penultimate day for the Christmas sale, you’re running out of time.

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Three…

We’re down to less than three days remaining on the Christmas sale – don’t delay !

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Four…

Only four days to go in the Christmas sale

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Five …

There are just under five days remaining in the Christmas sale to grab a bargain…

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Ten Sale Days Remaining

The Christmas sale is merrily sailing along (excuse the pun), and I’m going up to the local post office almost daily with piles of orders to be dispatched. It has ten days to run, so you still have plenty of time to make a saving (although be mindful of the last posting dates if you’re hoping to receive anything before Christmas). As things stand we’re pretty much up to date with orders – I have managed to clear the backlog so orders are being turned round pretty swiftly. We have a couple held up by a failed resin building mould that Phil is rapidly remaking, and we had run out of Imperial Skies turn rulers (again). However, new supplies of those were delivered today so they’ll be out the door in the next day or two, and are also back on the website.

We’ve had a cold spell here in the UK, so the workshop is, to say the least, a little nippy – this was the temperature inside the workshop when I switched on the machines the other day. I have a fan heater that keeps the casting room warm (if I don’t then the oil inside the air compressor motor is too viscous and it won’t run), but the main body of the workshop tends to resemble a walk-in freezer !

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We’ve managed to stay on plan this year, so I’ve spent the majority of the last couple of weeks casting, packing and posting orders. I’ve also managed to find time to do some design work on new releases for next year and we have some interesting new bits lined up – there are new releases planned in the spaceships, Aeronef, Small Scale Scenery, 6mm and 15mm SF ranges for the first three months of next year. For now, here’s a preview of the hull of a new 15mm tank I’ve been working on…

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PacFed Upgrades

One of our most popular 15mm ranges is the PacFed (Pacific Federation), probably because of their futuristic look with the wide grav skirts and rail guns. The designs are based on their 6mm counterparts but with a rather different styling and much more detail (as befits some of the first 3D sculpts we made). We decided recently that we would upgrade the models in the Polyversal pledge to the standard of the 15mm designs and showed off the 3D models. Now we have the models in hand and we’ve started casting in anger to fulfil our part of the pledges.

We thought it might be interesting to show some side-by-side images of the old and new models for comparison. As you can see, we’ve kept them pretty much the same size and layout as the originals but otherwise they’ve had a commplete facelift. One lesson learnt from previous rescales has been to beef up the proportions of the guns otherwise they can be too spindly. In addition, I’ve also found it can be a good idea to increase the thickness of turrets as well, as a straight scaling from the 15mm models can leave them looking a bit thin. I’m sure it doesn’t need pointing out but, just in case, the old models are on the left of each picture 🙂

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We have now finished remodelling all of the PacFed range in 6mm, including a couple of 15mm vehicles that haven’t previously been available in 6mm (the Raeside and Dundas). We have masters of all of them which are just about to be committed to moulds (in fact I picked up a fresh batch of blank moulds from the manufacturers this morning) so there will be more photos once we’ve been able to cast the first masters.

SALE UPDATE

It’s all hands to the pump here right now – the Black Friday offer seems to have kicked the sale into overdrive (it was going well enough anyway). I’ve been trying to turn round orders as fast as possible to avoid any sort of backlog building up, but this weekend’s flood of orders means that I’m now running about 4-5 days behind – so orders placed up to yesterday will hopefully be posted by the end of this week.

Normally I try to process orders in the sequence that they are received, so that everyone is treated fairly. However, as the first of the last posting dates starts to loom into view I will prioritise orders so that they have the best chance of arriving for Christmas. Essentially, this means I’ll try to make sure orders get posted in time for their respective dates.

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Black Friday Specials

We don’t generally do anything special for Black Friday – usually we already have our sale running, or about to run, so we’re covered. However, this year we thought we’d join in the fun and do a one-day special just on three specific ranges.

So for today, from midnight to midnight UK time we’ll be increasing the discount on our three 28mm ranges, Celtos, Magpie Miniatures and the Great War Belgians, to a stonking 30%. At the end of the day it’ll revert to the normal 15% for the remainder of the sale (which runs, in case you’d forgotten, until December 17th).

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Great War Belgians

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Last Posting Dates 2016

As mentioned in the sale announcement last week, one of the reasons for bringing the sale forward is to allow overseas customers to place orders in time to receive them by Christmas.

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All of our orders are sent by First Class mail (UK) or International Standard mail (overseas). The Royal Mail’s last recommended postings for various destinations are:

  • Saturday 3 December – Africa, Middle East
  • Wednesday 7 December – Cyprus, Asia, Far East (including Japan), Eastern Europe (except Poland, Czech Republic and Slovakia), Turkey, Malta
  • Thursday 8 December – Caribbean, Central & South America
  • Saturday 10 December – Greece, Australia, New Zealand
  • Wednesday 14 December – Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, Poland
  • Thursday 15 December – Canada, Finland, Sweden, USA
  • Friday 16 December – Austria, Denmark, Iceland, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Switzerland
  • Saturday 17 December – Belgium, France, Ireland, Luxembourg
  • Wednesday 21 December – UK

I’m afraid that the last posting date for Antartica has already passed…

Obviously we aren’t always able to ship out orders on the same or next day, some may take several days to a week to process, so if you want to place an order as a present, please, please don’t leave it to the last minute.

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