GW colored plastic vs grey plastic

[Marshal van Trapp]

From a hobby perspective, are they the same? Can I join them with plastic glue? Do they have the same hardness and can I easily convert the colored plastics?

 

I ask because I recently purchased a bunch of what I thought were the grey plastic DI marines on ebay but they arrived the blue plastic of the Know no Fear box and I was planning to convert them into "true scale" noise marines

[Fajita Fan]

Same stuff, just has a colored pigment in it.

[Bryan Blaire]

The sprue grey is a color additive as well. GW has actually used multiple shades of grey over the years.

[Cryptix]

GW plastic is already colored, there's no difference.

[DBadger]

Perhaps it's just that defects show up easier on the blue plastic, but I've always found it to seem inferior. Seems to always have more flash and more prominent mould lines, and any blue kits I've had have not fit anywhere near as well as the grey plastic. It seems to be more brittle too, and lighter? There's no weight to them at all.

[Maschinenpriester]

I have experienced, that the red, and the brown plastic from the kill ｔｅａｍ．ｓuff seems to tend to have more bubbles in it and break more easily.

[Fajita Fan]

Perhaps it's just that defects show up easier on the blue plastic, but I've always found it to seem inferior. Seems to always have more flash and more prominent mould lines, and any blue kits I've had have not fit anywhere near as well as the grey plastic. It seems to be more brittle too, and lighter? There's no weight to them at all.

I haven’t noticed that, look at the stormtroopers box - lines all over every piece. The blue easy to build primaris models I have are all pretty clean but they have the same weight. They’re more hollow in many pieces but it’s the same plastic.

[Verux]

I am of the opinion that the colored plastics from the kill team boxes I bought are not of the same quality as the standard plastics. The plastic is not nearly as dense and they break much easier.

[Kinstryfe]

I think it's largely psychological. I've found the blue to be similar, but the brown to seem less dense. I wouldn't be surprised to find that they're all statistically similar and that we're just making up the difference.

[Azekai]

The kill team plastic I have interacted with (red and brown) was brittle and slick (didn't receive/hold paint well). I did not care for it, and it certainly seems lower grade than the typical grey. 

[Aramis K]

I've tried blue and green GW plastic minis and I don't like it either.

Reasons probably in my head, I've no evidence the properties are different. But, Harder to see the definition when converting. Feels more like I'm painting a toy than a model.

[Canadian_F_H]

The colored plastics definitly seam different, but I can't put my finger on why or how. I've done a few light conversions on the red plastic from space hulk... IDK.

[Fajita Fan]

The colored plastic turns light when you shave it but the gray plastic probably does too and we just can't see it.  I've done Bloodbowl conversions with the colored and gray ones and they're identical to me. They glue the same, split the same, and sand the same. 

[Droz_64]

The terrain colored plastic has been fine, but the ones for the models have been awful. Almost all of the Skitarii from the KT box had broken pieces

[Urauloth]

The green plastic used for some of the DG minis has a slightly different property to the grey stuff. It doesn't cut, file or sand the same. I thought I was imagining it when I first worked on the ETB kits, but it seems to be a consistent difference. I still don't see why colouring it green instead of grey would make a difference though. Then again, if you've ever been unlucky nough to get a late-in-the-batch sprue which has less of the grey additive and comes up a really pale colour, that's miserable to work with. I don't think the additive is just colouration.

[shandwen]

I'm under the impression that most of the colored plastic is a different mixture than normal kits, bending and breaking easier, and as stated before being smoother and causing issues if not primed properly (and the normal plastic does ok with a light spray). It has been found with other companies products that the pigments often cause drastically differing qualities in a product that is otherwise identical. It may be the only change is pigmentation.

[Arkhanist]

An extreme example of coloured plastic problems was gold plastic syndrome - basically with old transformers collectibles, the gold or bronze plastic of a certain generation would fracture and crumble under the slightest pressure. 

 

The theorised cause was the chemical bonds between dye, fleck and polymer was weaker in places, possibly due to insufficient mixing, and you'd end up with voids and/or powdery internals which would weaken the plastic considerably. Hasbro tweaked the process by trial and error (mostly by reducing the amount of gold fleck) and supposedly solved the problem.

 

You can see a similar effect with coloured dice - there's a few examples on youtube of unbalanced dice being cut open and there being a void and/or powder instead of solid plastic.

 

GW have considerable experience with the grey mix plastic so they've probably got the process pretty nailed, though I've had a handful of lighter coloured ones over the years that had less sharp detail and had some odd breaks around joints out the box where it looked like they'd fallen apart rather than snapped (no stress fractures, no discolouration).

 

I personally think that the coloured plastic manufacturing isn't quite dialled in right in some places, maybe due to slightly different dye chemical/mechanical performance, so there's a greater risk of a plastic cast that's a bit different performance than we're used to. It's a combo of chemical and mechanical engineering to get it to flow properly into the moulds and set solid after, and getting it right is a harder process than you'd think.

 

I haven't actually used much of the coloured plastic personally, only the original 3rd gen space hulk box, and they seemed fine? Though I didn't need to convert them any. I do have a bunch of ETB death guard I haven't started on yet though (damn my plastic crack habit) so I guess I'll find out!

 

Since they mostly use non-grey on the ETB kits aimed at novices it may be it's an issue of low concern, or they've not had sufficient complaints to do anything, or they have investigated and not found any issues yet.

 

If everyone complained with details when you got a bit of a duff sprue (even if you're able to work around it cos experienced hobbyist and don't need replacements) it might help GW improve the process for that colour.

[Bryan Blaire]

I wouldn't say that coloring plastics often causes drastically different properties - it really depends on the method used and the material in play, which is influenced by the cost of the process, so it's not universal.

 

If they are truly using a different formulation of plastic, it could explain the altered physical properties people are noticing - that seems to be the more likely culprit than the pigmentation (unless they are using one of the cheaper processes). The pigments are foreign bodies in the plastic polymer, but they are generally so small that the polymerization around them shouldn't allow for drastic changes in physical property (there can be minor variances, but these are usually things tested for in a lab, not something that should be easily noticed by a consumer).

 

With the wide range of colored plastics that are needed in production world-wide, materials companies have put a lot of research and work into the coloration process to minimize variances caused by pigmenting processes.

 

Again, even the standard sprue grey plastic GW uses is pigmented artificially - raw plastic/resin pellets aren't that dark a color naturally, being clear to milky to sometimes lightly white-grey, depending on the polymer formulation. It seems like it would be really strange for that grey coloration to not alter properties much, but blue, red, green, brown, or tan pigmentation to begin to highly alter properties of the plastic that it would be observable by the end user. I am wondering if there is actually a different type of plastic in play.

 

I agree with Arkhanist, if the colored material really seems different, I'd let GW know. There may be something that's going wrong internally, or it could be that there is a materials situation that needs to be rectified with their producer (who likely also makes the masterbatch that gets used for the coloration and developed the formulation for the pigment process, such as 20 natural pellets to one color pellet to get X color).

[Burni]

I built some grey Skitarii and some red Skitarii (from the Kill Team box) at the same time. These plastics were not the same. The red plastic is so much more brittle and I actively dislike it. I'm gutted the BSF uses it :(

 

I dislike it so much that I'd rather pay extra for the Primaris lib in grey than get the coloured, much cheaper version from Conquest...

[Fajita Fan]

I'm genuinely surprised. 

[DBadger]

I built some grey Skitarii and some red Skitarii (from the Kill Team box) at the same time. These plastics were not the same. The red plastic is so much more brittle and I actively dislike it. I'm gutted the BSF uses it :(

 

I dislike it so much that I'd rather pay extra for the Primaris lib in grey than get the coloured, much cheaper version from Conquest...

I just built the latter and would be livid if I'd paid full price for it. This is really, really not the same plastic at all. It's like toy plastic. Tinks when you tap it. And so many gaps.

[Rik Lightstar]

I think it may be down to them trying to find a formulation that can be painted directly on to....

 

I've noticed the same, but I don't remember it from things like Space Hulk

 

Rik

[DBadger]

So... Moved onto my Reivers. These are clearly GW grey plastic but in a blue version! Not the same plastic as he cheapskate's librarian.

 

It feels entirely different. If you ran your nail along normal plastic you'd create a dent, whereas the plastic the librarian is made of is hard and smooth.

 

So I think there are multiple things at play here.

[Bryan Blaire]

So... Moved onto my Reivers. These are clearly GW grey plastic but in a blue version! Not the same plastic as he cheapskate's librarian.

It feels entirely different. If you ran your nail along normal plastic you'd create a dent, whereas the plastic the librarian is made of is hard and smooth.

So I think there are multiple things at play here.

Sounds like it, that's pretty crazy. So there are probably standard kit plastic with pigment (which may slightly alter physical properties), and then there's what sounds like a completely different formulation of plastic.

[DuskRaider]

The only difference in my experience is it's a bigger pain in the ass priming the colored sprues due to the base coloration always seeming to show through.