Iron Wind Metals
| Iron Wind Metals | ||
|---|---|---|
 |
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| Year Established | 2001 | |
| Notable Employees | Basically anybody who was at one point a Ral Partha sculptor | |
| Notable Games | Battletech models, old Ral Partha/FASA models | |
| Website | https://www.ironwindmetals.com/ | |
Iron Wind Metals is the Ohio-based entity formed after the chaos of the 2000's left the old Ral Partha company changing hands over and over. Iron Wind Metals now serves as a specialty metal model maker, most specifically for Battletech, in the modern day.
Origins[edit]
Iron Wind Metals has a long, complicated history that goes back to its days as Ral Partha, but the easy thing to know is that Ral Partha as an entity died after losing the DnD license, and FASA at one time owned all of Ral Partha's holdings after buying them out, and then decided to end their own existence quite suddenly, allowing them to get snapped up by the company that would become WizKids. WizKids decided to spin them off into being their own thing again, but thanks to the fun of copyright law, they had to change the name, and so the group chose Iron Wind Metals, and it's stuck from there.
Since then, they pretty much kept up where they've left off; having survived closures, transfers of rights, and all sorts of wild corpo nonsense, all with the Battletech and Shadowrun licenses intact. Oh, and since they were technically always capable of making the old models, they began recreating a line of nostalgia-bait models from the 70's-80's for your buying pleasure under the Ral Partha banner; you can even try some of those old modules that Ral Partha made and then shelved!
Their original models are, for the most part, just as chunky and modeled about as well as you'd expect, though they're unquestionably some of the best doing it in metal these days. While they're never going to quite match a plastic and resin kit's level of detail, their molds are impressively detailed, and are a testament to the decades of work they've put into this hobby.
Notable Products[edit]
- Battletech remains a major figure for them: all models the game has are currently made by them.
- Pretty much any Ral Partha figurine you wanted as a young neckbeard, though they are not made from lead anymore.
- HackMaster models. And given their old-school sensibilities, it works perfectly for the more parodic nature of that game.