Asharah / Standard Bearers / Musician in 28mm and 54mm

All orders for the above minis dated June 15 and earlier have now been shipped, and customers notified. This week, we are expecting all orders from June 15 to July 30th to be shipped as well. We will receive notification of shipments made by the foundry at the end of the week, and will update customers as well as this blog accordingly.

 Partial shipments

Moreover, we will exceptionally make partial shipments for orders of Syl-Iriah and/or Kahn-Urkan that include Asharah, the Standard Bearers and/or the Musician. These last three figures will be shipped as soon as they are produced by the foundry. For Syl-Iriah and/or Kahn-Urkan, keep reading...

Update on Syl-Iriah and Kahn-Urkan's availability:

Syl-Iriah, the Spirit of the Woods, has been designed and sculpted using updated techniques. The 3D printed masters have just been touched up manually by the expert hands of MIKH, who was the lead sculptor during Rackham's glory days. In addition, Syl-Iriah is ushering in a new collaboration with a renowned and very reliable foundry.

However, although we thought we had finally done everything right, the production of this mini fell behind in the most unexpected way. Without going into the dirty details, let's just say that a potential collaborator pretty much kidnapped the masters of our poor Syl-Iriah, and we had to jump through hoops for nearly a month to recover them! Fortunately, the lady is now in good hands and this sad adventure is behind us. But as you can probably imagine, we spent many a sleepless night on this unfortunate affair, which did nothing to alleviate the stress of launching a new business.

However, since this surreal event, everything has proceeded pretty much according to plan and we expect to ship all Syl-Iriah pre-orders before the end of August. We will keep you informed by email when your order is in the post.

Meanwhile, these sleepless nights did not go to waste: we used that time to finally locate a truly amazing 3D printing technique that we will introduce with Kahn-Urkan's masters. It is with much excitement that we can assure you that there will be no difference in the level of details of our 3D renders shown on our website and the 28 and 54mm minis. You can see that for yourself on this photo of this first 28mm sample made with this technology:

The detailing is so fine that we will now have to be careful how far we push the level of details so that the minis remain easy to paint ...

Therefore, we have chosen to re-print the Kahn-Urkan masters with this new technology, because it would be a crime not to let you benefit from it as early as possible!
Obviously, this is taking some additional time, costing us more, and shifting Kahn-Urkan's shipping date, but we carefully weighed the pros and cons of doing this and we are confident that when you see the minis, you will approve of our decision. In any case, the shipping date should not go beyond early September. We'll tell you more in a few days.

Although we have gone through some challenging times, and as we look forward to  a few hypothetical vacation days, the recent months' work is now bearing fruit and we are confident and quite excited about the future of Raging Heroes. We have gorgeous minis in preparation, our team is growing and, through our extensive research, we've made contact with partners that open up new creative possibilities. Yet absolutely none of that would be possible without your encouragement and your enthusiasm, and we thank you for that. As always, we welcome your thoughts and comments.

Written on August 06, 2010 — 1 comments

Giving birth to our first Command Group will have been a challenge that we would never have imagined. But, at last, this is done. The remaining orders are currently being fulfilled. Here is the plan, agreed upon with the foundry:

28mm: The last 28mm Command Groups that haven't shipped yet will be taken care of this week. The worst-case scenario is that the last ones will be sent on Wednesday of the following week.

54mm: Orders containing 54mm minis that have not been processed yet will be dealt with in the following manner: since the Eleriel and Alaniel's flag is a real nightmare to cast (see next paragraph for details), we will cast all the Asharah and Moloss & Minion first, send them to you starting in the beginning of next week so that you can get most of your order as soon as possible. This first batch will not take more than two weeks. Once we're done with that, we'll have the foundry working exclusively on casting the 54mm Eleriel and Alaniel, and we'll have them sent to you separately free of charge.

So what took us so long?
Well, the overall complexity of the project has exceeded everything our team could have expected. In the end, the 54mm Command Group requires a set of 15 different moulds to be cast! The Eleriel and Alaniel's flag has been the most problematic part, both in 28mm and 54mm. It took many trials and test moulds before the right approach was found. But this is still a complex element to cast and no more than 15 54mm Eleriel and Alaniel can be produced per mould in a week!

Written on June 14, 2010 — 0 comments

Greetings!

Once again, elements seem to be conspiring against us, the raging heroes ;-)
After snow storms delayed shipping of the masters earlier this year, now volcanoes are trying to prevent us from shipping your minis. Indeed, the ashes from the Icelandic volcano have had a large impact on the English mail system, which has even advised us to hold on to our packages for several days until the situation is stabilized!

From the information we have so far, things are expected to improve in the next few days and the postal service should soon go back to its usual standards of efficiency… As usual, we’ll keep you posted as soon as we know more…

Written on April 20, 2010 — 1 comments

There was a break in order production and packing over the long Easter weekend, but since then, the foundry has re-opened and shipments have resumed.

28 mm orders placed from February 1 to mid-March will be all done by the middle of this week. For those of you who have ordered since March 15, shipments will begin next week. From there, we will finally be current on all 28mm orders.

For the 54mm minis, the foundry is behind schedule but shipments will begin in mid-week and will continue steadily until the backlog is handled.

Again, thank you for your patience and your trust. It’s a big relief for us to know that we are finally about to catch up with the delays and that we will finally be able to ship within a few days after orders are received.

You’ve probably realized by now that creating the production moulds is the step that took much longer than expected. Our very competent master caster confessed to never having had to work on such complex models! Working on a virtual sculpt forces us to make decisions that will affect the eventual casting of parts, a challenge when we are not actually able to hold the master in hand. Overall, it works well, but some problems do not become apparent until the 3D printing of the master has occurred. It is then necessary to manually correct some details, or reassess the approach to making the mould. All this took a long time for this first series of minis. For our upcoming models, we have already addressed several of those issues. Furthermore, we’ve allocated them a much more generous amount of production time.

With all those delays, we chose to wait several weeks before beginning the sale of Legendary and Heroic Syl-Iriah. It did not seem appropriate to offer up new products while the shipment of current orders was so much behind schedule. But at the same time, those delays have now made it necessary to once again offer pre-orders, first on Syl-Iriah, and, in a few days, on the Vampire and Dark Elf Lords. With plans to release a large number of references by the summer, we hope to eventually reverse this trend and start selling our products when they are actually available. Meanwhile, you can expect an avalanche of news in the next three months, and do keep sending us your thoughts on your dream mini, as some are already in the works…

And don’t miss our blog entry on how we’re improving the detailing on our minis…

Written on April 12, 2010 — 0 comments

- Article updated March 23rd
All the challenges of casting our 28mm minis are now a thing of the past, and our foundry is casting non-stop. We have had two additional moulds made for casting the standard of 28mm Eleriel&Alaniel, and so production has sped up. (The standard is cast in resin instead of metal, and curing time is slow.)

If you’ve ordered 28mm Asharah and/or Moloss&Minion in 28mm and/or 54mm, and your order has no other minis, then your order has shipped (except for 3 that were shipping this Monday).

If your order includes 28mm Eleriel&Alaniel (with or without the minis mentioned above), all December orders have been shipped. Most January orders were cast this week and will ship all week starting Tuesday the 23rd.

The casting of 54mm Asharah is beginning this Monday, and its shipping will be done in the order in which orders were received, starting next Monday (the 29th). Casting of 54mm Eleriel&Alaniel will start at the end of this week.

We will update this blog again as soon as we have more info. In the meantime, keep an eye on our blog, we will be making several announcements this week!

Written on March 21, 2010 — 1 comments

First of all, for those of you who are still waiting for their orders to arrive, you’ll be happy to know that all the 28mm December orders will have been shipped by next Monday and that our foundry is working around the clock to clear the backlog of pre-orders. We should have another update concerning the 54mm Asharah and Eleriel & Alaniel very soon.

For more details on the production, check out our blog post here.

Written on March 12, 2010 — 0 comments