Let me know if this is in the wrong place, and I'll move it.
Short form - I spent the last couple of days assembling 12 IWM minis, most of which are quite recent - last couple of years, or so. I'm making a Dark Age Kuritan unit, so it was an excuse to buy these newer minis. Hit some good things & some bad things as I went, thought
a) might be interesting for the sculptors, and IWM folks, who visit here to see some feedback, and
b) opportunity for others to chip in with their experience/opinion.
Transparency - while I've been building Ral Partha, then IWM, minis for decades, I consider myself 'regular' skill, not veteran or elite. I'm using superglue gel with moisture assist, comfortable with using blu-tak to support drying joints. I will pin if I feel I have to, prefer not. YMMV.
Also, my thanks to the good people of IWM, and all the sculptors and artists, that have worked to make it possible to buy BattleTech minis despite our less-than-stellar market size. Without you all, we'd not have anything to complain about ... O:-) Seriously, every interaction I've had with IWM has been more than I expected. They're good people.
That said ... I felt it worth sharing my thoughts.
Tenshi. I heard a lot of concern about the number of pieces involved; yes, there's a ton - more than 10 - but they came together suprisingly well. Good contact points, pillars & holes, domes & depressions. Nice details too, and very impressive when assembled. So if you're considering a Tenshi, and are happy to take your time - eg. let the legs & feet dry before attaching to the waist - go for it!
(BTW, they should throw in a third leg - if any mini begs to be kitbashed into a tripod, this one does! :D )
Hatamoto-Suna. This is a gorgeous big piece of metal, in several parts. So much glorious detail! The post-and-hole joints are the best I've seen so far, This one assembles like a dream, and the back-flags fit in just fine. The head being separate is a bit meh - there's only one position it can go in - but it's no trouble to glue, and presumably made casting easier. Highly recommended if you like a bit of Samurai action in the Dark Age!
DA-sculpt Black Knight. Mixed opinions here. The legs - each leg is a separate foot, lower leg, and upper leg. But the connections work really well, and you can get a bit of posing action without pinning. Torso is a big lump, well detailed. The arms ... each arm has an upper arm, and a lower weapon section. The connecting post & hole here are very, very shallow - more of an impression than anything that actually feels like a connection. And, given the construction, there's no option for posability - right-angle, pointing front, is it. Sculptors, this is what you shouldn't do. Any post-and-hole should be at least 2mm deep, not fractions. And I don't believe that this would have made casting more difficult. The legs - brilliant! Shame about the elbows. But a good looking mini.
Wight Simple mini - base/feet/legs/torso one piece, torso, head, two arms. The head is nicely posable, albeit the post on the top of the torso was a good bit skinnier than the corresponding hole. The shoulder connections looked like they should have been nightmares - very thin arms - but went on brilliantly. Again, great mini. And I'm sure I could have easily reposed those tichy arms with a quick bend.
Black Hawk KU Now I didn't realise we had a resculpt here. The new mini is larger, and way more detailed than the old one - good! But it's stuck in the old "parade rest" position as the old one. A little dynamism would have been great - but those are stonking great feet to cut one off the base. The mini came together easily. Two negatives. One, the mini was made of a very hard, brittle, and silver-ish pewter, not the light grey and ductile ralladium of the other minis so far. If I hadn't opened the IWM blister myself, I'd be harkening back to the bad old repro days - this really resembled the 'pot metal' you'd see when you stripped down a mini you'd traded for, or (for the really old mini hands) finding 'REBEL' etched under the mini base. Made trimming harder, and very hard to file. Fortunately little of either needed. Second, the front of the arms. The arms are locked in right-angle poses, and the depressions - impressions, more like - of the 5 laser holes in the prime config are very shallow. Having put so much lovely detail in the rest of the mini, what happened here? As it was I was making an F variant, so the non-existant detail got covered anyway,
Chimera resculpt This is the K version, with sword, done by our own Stinger, and this is a good one. The ankles on the old sculpt were always a weak point. Here, the post & hole are really well sized, and allowed for easy posing. One downside - the ankle posts were significantly wider than the corresponding hole in the foot, so a good bit of filing was required to thin the posts down. With that done, excellent. The laser arm was a little confusing initially, but came together naturally; both arms went on easily, despite looking like the post-and-hole setup was a little thin.
Orochi Unnecessarily separated foot & legs; the foot only goes on at right angle, so posing would require more effort than I wanted to invest at this time. Really, you could have had a single piece base/feet/legs/waist for all the good it did. If you're not going to invest, as per the excellent Black Knight legs, and force us into parade rest, I'd recommend taking the simpler option.
Vulture Mk IV Okay, this one also appears to be made out of 'pot metal', and there's something about the surface that looks not quite right, but I want to see what happens when I prime it first. Now it's a big - Tenchi-sized - mini, with lots of detail, but the attachment points on this one are absolutely sub-par. Each nub - won't call them posts - is less than a mm high & wide, with correspondingly tiny holes, for the hips & shoulder joints. And the contact areas are tiny. After two tries to attach the legs & feet - one piece each - to the waist, and failing, I've drilled for pinning, and will try again tomorrow. When the pieces being held together are that heavy, these joints are just not satisfactory. If you had posts 2mm wide & 3mm long, this would have been a dream to assemble. The detail is good, and the free arm to make the A variant was appreciated.
Wolverine This is the Project Phoenix sculpt. Very simple - four pieces - and went together very simply. A little thinner than I might have liked, but a good mini.
Ghost Aaaah, lots of pieces! But went together like a dream. Waist sits on base/feet/legs/groin, torso on waist, arms in decent dome-and-hollow joints for easy posing. The 'handles' on the torso weapons are a little fiddly, but connected well. Even the 'exhaust stacks' on the back went in easily, with great post-and-hole connections to make the Vulture IV blush in shame & envy.
Komodo - this is an old sculpt; four pieces again. The shoulder ball-and-socket joints could have been more generous, but worked well enough. When this one gets a resculpt, move the legs a little! But very much what it said on the tin.
Strider Again, an old sculpt, very easy to assemble despite separate base/legs. With a slightly dynamic pose (shuffling, not running).
Short form - Some pretty good stuff there. But more often than I'd like to see, complexity of assembly seemingly for the sake of it. And perhaps some neglect of good contact options for joints, again not all the time, but that Vulture IV is up there with the first-gen PP Thud & Marauders. If we want more people to play, and more people to buy minis, and given plastics aren't going to be available for more than a limited number of sculpts, then all I can do is petition the sculptors to keep in mind that most of your prospective customers aren't experts, and aren't looking to pin every darned joint. (Mind you, pinning that Hatamoto-Suna would have been not only irrelevant, but hard work!) Keep those contact areas bigger, please!
And if you do go with single piece base/feet/legs/waist, make them walking, not standing please!
Happy to discuss any of my admittedly idiosyncratic observations with all & sundry.
Cheers,
W.