Liquid Green Stuff and its Coincidence to Finecast Quality

Games Workshop's
Liquid Green Stuff

Regardless of the timing and the perception of why it was released due to the failures of the Games Workshop Finecast quality control, Liquid Green Stuff is actually a very good product for gap filling that Games Workshop must have had in development far before the first finecast models hit the shelves, with all their deficiencies.
It is most comparable to modelling putties, like Squadron Green Putty, or Tamiya Modelling Putty.

Kneadatite's "Green Stuff" Epoxy Putty

Unlike other putties, Liquid Green Stuff is more like a paste. Its best feature is that it's water soluble, which Squadron Green (and grey) Putty, normal green stuff, and other modelling gap filling putties are not, usually requiring alcohol or even harsh solvent based thinners to dissolve and thin those for painting into cracks and gaps. Liquid Green Stuff brushes in to tight gaps. It dries fast, and hard. It can be sliced and filed. And it's great for gap filling not just resin models, but plastics as well as metals. If you want to do a massive gaping chasm, it will require multiple rounds of filling and drying, but it will still do the job.

Tamiya Putty

And frankly, the Finecast stuff has gotten a lot better in terms of miscasts. In fact, the UK and outside of North America did not experience nearly the same level of quality problems as the US. And I'm told that all the rejects that were returned were attributed to the US production, based on the batch number and in response GW has pulled Finecast production back to the UK for 100% of the production now, presumably until the US manufacturing facility gets their technical problems sorted out.

Squadron Green Putty

To verify this, I was in the local Games Workshop store on Saturday to pick up some new Necron stuff. While I was there I checked all the blisters they had on the wall, and couldn't see a single miscast model. Which is a whole hell of a lot better than when they first came out and I had a 100% reject rate on my first 10 Finecast models.

Unfortunately, when you have such a negative experience for such a large base of your customers and it gets out, it's going to be very hard to overcome the original perception of crappy quality. Especially when it was linked to price increases, after them saying it was done to reduce their costs. At the worst you would expect prices to remain stable, not increase...

GW has been suffering from very poor marketing, very poor PR, and very poor pricing policies, and have created a perfect storm of anger and dissatisfaction this past year that it's going to take a loooooong time to overcome.

Is this a knee jerk reaction to the quality problems with Finecast that has become known on the internet as "Failcast" and "Flashcast"? I don't think so. It takes time to develop a chemical product like this, and I suspect it's been in the works long before the epic quality issues GW experienced with its first run of Finecast. Unfortunately for GW, timing is everything, and the timing of this is so coincident with the Finecast issues that people are convinced it is related. A good reputation is easy to lose. And a bad reputation lingers. So how will GW fix their declining reputation?

Great products like this, on an ongoing basis will help. But Games Workshop can not rest on its laurels, and must be very public when fixing their errors, or when dealing with massive quality issues. In many cases, even a public acknowledgement of those problems and how they are dealing with them would mollify many of their customers.

Links:
Games Workshop
Kneadatite
Tamiya
Squadron