A Bit of a Review: Scibor Conversion Bitz

Firstly, you may have noticed the blog has had a slight facelift. Apologies for those that may have suffered while I was messing around with it. Doing the technical stuff on my fiancee's blog has given me a better idea of how to do certain things, so the blog now looks a little closer to how I originally wanted it. I should also add the disclaimer that the choice of flags is in no way meant to be jingoistic, be a call for the revival of the Empire and neither the separation of Newfoundland from Canada &c &c.... Anyhoo, on to the business of the day.

After reeling from the collaborative fluff I put together with Scipio the other day (read my part here, and Scipio's here), I decided to go back to being selfish and looking at some of my own stuff.

After watching British 70s classic, Children of the Stones, and listening to this superb Radio 4 documentary about the show by Stewart Lee, I decided to share a bit of Mawdryn related ramblings.

I've been going on about a colossal order of "bitz" for the past week, some of which includes some excellent parts for my Spears of Mawdryn Space Marines (Druid alert), as well as a major helping of bitz for my fledling Imperial Navy Landing Party... my holidays are well and truly sorted. As these have been dispatched to another address, rather than my current one, I'm eagerly looking forward to unwrapping them like a kid at Christmas. For once, this saying is quite timely.


Anyhoo, a couple of months back, I was browsing the various conversion and components sites out there and stumbled across these great resin pieces by Scibor Miniatures. I had been looking for some suitably Celtic shields, and these seemed just  right. A good size to boot. I also found these great Celtic decoration plates that I thought could be pressed into service on my "Barrow-Raised Dreadnoughts" and add a little flavour to the few vehicles used by the Chapter. Failing that, they would be great for any building scenery I put together for them.

From left to right, the packs are (4x) Celtic Decorated Plates #2 (€5.40), (2x) Celtic Decorated Plates #4 (€4.60), and (8x) Dwarves Shields (€5.40). For what you get in the packs, the cost is pretty reasonable. Postage was a rather odd €6.06 to the UK, but they arrived pretty quickly from Poland.

Pretty intricate knotwork on pieces so relatively small

Nice detailing on the reverse side too, more typically fantasy, but more than suitable for Mawdryn

Assault Marine hastily pressed into service for illustrative purposes...

As the name implies, these are meant to be Dwarf shields of the Fantasy variety, but they certainly aren't limited to just that. The shields are going to be used for my Honour Guard and/or Veterans, and the shields have a nice variety of design and two have the triskelion spiral device that I was looking for. As the image above shows, they scale nicely on the Space Marines, being near-enough perfectly sized.

The "Decorated Plates" are similarly a good size, but the larger ones above may be a little difficult to fit onto a vehicle without trimming. However, I'm sure I may be able to, and if not they won't go to waste

This is supposed to be a review however, and there is a slight flaw with all of these pieces. As intricately beautiful as the knotwork designs are, I'm guessing the moulds are rather shallow and this means that details can be lost on corners and curves in particular. This isn't the end of the world, but worth noting.

Close to the centre on the middle shield, and on the edges of the left-hand shield the detailing has a tendency to fade

Similarly, on the corners of these plates it appears that detailing has rubbed away.

All in all, despite a couple of flaws, I'd recommend these products (I'm not aware of anyone doing anything similar) and Scibor in general. Much of Scibor's stuff is not not to my persoanl taste, and looks like it's going beyond Heroic scale creep, and is a little flashy for me - but this seems to be the general direction of GW in general to be fair (more on this next post). However, I like their smaller bitz, and even with the larger, flashier stuff, whilst it might not be my cup of tea - technically they look sound and I'd certainly recommend them if that's what you're after.