28mm Sci Fi Project, Pt III - Pig Iron Heavy Infantry Showcase

After posting the painting guide I was more than excited to get these guys done up this weekend, and it looks like I finished them just shy under 8 hours - not bad! In line with what I mentioned during my initial review, these Pig Iron figures painted up fabulously. I'm a bit bummed that additions to their ranges look to have slowed down a bit over the years as they seem to be focusing more on head options, so hopefully they'll come out with some more exciting stuff in the future!

I see some AAR's from this force very soon most likely using Tomorrow's War. For now however, I put together what is essentially my first staged miniature showcase to hold you all over until then!

28mm Sci Fi Project, Pt II - Pig Iron Heavy Infantry Painting

Before painting this force, as usual I decided to get a test-figure out of the way to make sure I was happy with the planned scheme. As you'll see below, these Pig Iron miniatures paint up really nicely and have some well defined detail without being too busy. Since these figures will be played with in a unit, I didn't want to go overboard on the paint job, shooting for a tabletop standard with minimal effort. 

See the image annotations for the steps I used to paint this test figure below - I will be using the same steps to complete the rest of his unit.

Mounted on a 20mm MDF base, the tab is covered with a mix of spackle and sand for ground texture. The figure is primed with a light gray and then given a zenithal dusting from above with white.

28mm Sci Fi Project, Pt I - Pig Iron Heavy Infantry Review

If you were an Imperial Guard player back in the early 2000's, chances are you've heard of Pig Iron.

Even today, they hosted some of the best headswaps available to Guard players who were looking to customize their armies. I remember picking up some head variants myself way back in 2004, and remember being very impressed with the quality of their casts and spread of head options. 

Revisiting their website throughout the years, I was always interested to see their other figure lines, and often wondered who used them and why - specifically their Kolony range. To a 13 year old who only new 40k, it seemed odd to me that such a range of Sci-Fi figs existed and seemed so much different than your regular guardsman.

Thankfully now, it is clear to me that multiple rulesets for Sci-Fi exist and are quite good, and these figures fit the bill perfectly. Alas, it was finally time to get my hands dirty and dig into these ranges which I had been eyeing for over 15 years now. 

I decided to pick up the entire Heavy Infantry set from Pig Iron. Shipping was quick, although post-Brexit shipping prices were a bit heavy, and stopped me from adding more (like some of their awesome looking Resin vehicles). Packaging was great, and you can see the figures as received below; 

Simply put, these figures are fantastic. The sculpts are clean, the casting is great with minimal to no flash, mold lines aren't too harsh, and they have a great weight to them. Most importantly though, they look badass.

The one downside I'd knock them for is that the heads are a bit fiddly to get to fit right, which is partially due to the the way they are gated onto the metal sprue they come on. You'll need to be careful removing them and won't want to snip too much off the neck portion. If you have any experience with metal models though it shouldn't be too much of a problem for you. 

With just an hours work I was able to clean them, base them up on 20mm rounds, and get them ready for basing. Currently, we're looking at using Tomorrow's War - a Sci-Fi variant of Force on Force - as our ruleset, but thankfully these figures are generic enough where I'm confident they can fit a wide variety of systems. All in all, I'd definitely purchase these again and am excited to see more from Pig Iron in the future. Keep your eyes on this space for Part II where I'll begin to paint these up.