In a previous blog post I spoke about the self imposed Zero bits challenge that I have decided to follow in order to clean up all of the spare bits generated by my miniature purchases.

Today I want to speak about the overall progress I have made since I initially started with this challenge and give an overview of what is still pending to be done.

Some time ago I have create a spreadsheet to track my purchases and my progress in terms of building and painting and eventually I decided to start using to track down the progress of the challenge as well.

The spreadsheet contains all of the miniatures purchases I have made through the years and I use 2 different colours to represent the status, the green on the box type represents that all of the miniatures in the box(es) were painted and the blue on the amount of boxes is used to represent that all of the parts contained in those boxes have been spent (meaning only the sprue itself remains).

This is the current status of the progress in visual form:

In addition to tracking whether or not the boxes no longer contain parts, I also use the spreadsheet for an overall view of what was purchased, built, converted and painted.

The categories that each miniature can be a part of are as follows:

• Bought - As the name implies, this is the amount of miniatures you can build according to the box;
• Converted - Miniatures that were built beyond the box, scratch built or who have been made using parts purchased individually;
• Built - This represents the miniatures that have been assembled, which includes miniatures built out of the box as well as the miniatures that were converted beyond the box. Assuming 100% of the Bought miniatures were built, this category represents the sum of Bought+Converted.
• Painted - Essentially the miniatures that have been painted regardless of their origin.

As it can be seen, the amount of Converted miniatures is greater in some of the groups I have defined than in others, with Buildings having way more Converted than Bought, which is mostly due to scratch built terrain pieces/buildings which I have done based on spare parts from the sprues and recycled/reused materials plus a few other things that were bought for the purpose (aquarium plants for example, for decoration of scratch built buildings).

As time goes by, the amount of Converted miniatures is likely going to increase, as I convert more stuff to spend the large amount of bits I have in my boxes.
To give a sense of scale, I currently have more than 600 converted infantry soldiers/characters, representing roughly 22% of my total infantry, with most of those 600 being extra models built using sculpted bodies, extra torsos/legs or moulded bodies cast manually by me.

For infantry I suspect that the final result will be close to 50/50 in terms of Bought versus Converted, with the possibility of the Converted getting even more numerous than the Bought stuff, but for Heavy Weapons there are still many spare weapons to be built, so the originally bought HWT will likely represent the minority once I am finished.

The scale of how many stuff I can do with the spare parts is still something that I have not fully realized yet and as I progress more, I will start to get a better idea of how much "waste" is typically generated by the extra customization parts.