Iron Wind Metals extends the deadline for archive mechs

Iron Wind Metals has been issuing regular BattleTech releases for 8 years now. And in that time, unlike when Ral Partha had the line, we have not discontinued anything.

As a result, the line has grown large – very large. Too large for any distributor or store to hope to be able to carry it completely. So large, in fact, that we are beginning to run out of room at the factory. With this years releases we are at well over 600 individual items and climbing, many of which sell less than 12 units per year.

As such, we are at the point where we need to cull the line, drop the slow movers, and make some room for new product. This will help us, the distributors, and the stores to better stock the core line and thus help keep the game growing.

At the same time, however, we want to keep everything available in some fashion as a service for the player who suddenly needs an obscure mech or vehicle…

With this in mind, Iron Wind announces its new Archive Service.

As of January 30th, 2009, we will be moving 233 BattleTech items to Archive status. These items will no longer be available through distribution or the normal part of our website. We will no longer keep packaged stock on hand and can thus eliminate hundreds of parts bins, freeing up loads of much needed warehouse space.

The archive items will be moved to a special section of our website. All items in the Archive section will be available for order, at a special archive price.

As we will not be keeping any cast or packaged stock on hand for these items. If a customer needs one it will be specially cast to order. The caster will have to hunt up the molds and then spin each one – usually at least two spins for each mold, as the 1st spin is too cold to get good quality castings.

Due to this extra labor, we will need to add an archive charge of $8.00 per each different item ordered to the regular price. Thus, a $10.50 mech would cost $18.50 with the archive charge added on.

However, this charge will only be added to the 1st copy of each Archive item ordered by an individual customer. If two or more of a particular Archive mech or vehicle are ordered, only the 1st would incur the $8.00 archive charge. The second and so on would be at regular price, as once we have pulled the molds and warmed them up, there is no extra labor involved in running extra copies.

For the present, our website is not set up to handle orders for multiples of Archived items. Anyone wishing to “spread-out” the archive charge by ordering multiples of anything can do so by contacting us directly. If there is sufficient demand, we will work towards getting the website set up to handle these orders directly.

Meanwhile, all items on the Archive list will be available for order as usual through January.

{Due to the high level of demand from fans, we are extending the cut-off date to end of business on Friday, February 13th.)