Boats for 25/28mm

Devon Jones on Thingiverse and elsewhere has done a lot of work on Openforge a Dwarven Forge compatible set of terrain pieces. Sadly RPGs are not in my future but these dinghies will be great for Space 1889 - the shorter one is just alien enough.

Printing notes - lots of small blobs and stringing. I think I need to turn the temperature down a bit. Slic3r now has filament specific temperature settings. I am also going to re-cut at .3 or .4 layer height for a better wood effect. 

Shiny and Chrome

So a good friend is going through a rough patch and is looking to distract herself by doing a little Furiosa cosplay. Emmj on Thingiverse put up this rather nice design so naturally I had to print one out and pass it on.

It came out very well.

15mm SF vehicles

Just a quick post. This is a series of wheeled AFVs for 15mm sf war gaming. Printed in PLA and in top and bottom halves because of support problems.  The latest version of Slic3r is finally giving good results for support so I may convert the models to single piece.

Hot off the build plate

Two posts in one day....

The original APC.

Heavy Tank Turret 

Another view

Turret top

An annoying but small axis slip right near the top.  Time for some printer maintenance I think.   There are also some known issues with printing very small isolated parts that don't have enough time to cool between layers.  Other than that, I am very happy with this print and it will end up on the table.

Long time no post.

Well it has been quite a while since I posted anything here. There are good reasons and bad but they are of no importance.

The 3d printing experience has been a mix of joy and despair, success and failure - just like life. However, this is not the post to get into that.  What I have found is that once the printer is up and running, design is what really matters.

Over on my wargaming blog I have posted some of the things I have been printing.  The open forge dungeon tiles by Devon Jones were a success - sadly I found that after I printed a bunch, I really wasn't going to get back into RPGs.  They have been passed onto another home where I hope they will be of use. Very successful were the pill boxes I printed up in part for a contest for Chain of Command, Pictures over on Mike Whitaker's blog

Printing slowed down a lot, one of the major reasons being that I didn't want to just print crap, the second being that the design process can take longer than one thinks. However  I seemed to have turned a corner on that.

A while back, my friends Marc and Dan decided to suck me into the world of Gruntz a 15mm Sci-fi rule set. I had some very old Martian Metals figures for power armour but no vehicles. I did some mucking around in OpenScad and came up with these based very loosely on the Alvis Saladin series of vehicles :

Grav Tank

Grav APC

They aren't bad and even made it on the table:

When I posted the OpenScad previews in the 15mm wargaming group on Facebook, I was surprised that I had several questions about where to buy them and a message from a friend saying he can cast resin.  While they were good enough for the table, I wanted to work on them to bring them up to a reasonable standard before looking into if it would be economical to get into producing them commercially. The I got sidetracked a bit and came up with a heavy tank version:

Heavy Tank side view

Heavy Tank top view

The big change in thinking was to add Moar Greebles! It actually takes longer to render these in Openscad than it does to slice them at .1mm. Barrels are still an issue but I will likely fall back on brass or plastic rod,  These are going on the build plate today.  More to follow.

Building the ReprapPro tricolour Mendel

What you get is many kilos of nuts, bolts threaded rod and various electronic bits. A quick unboxing can be found on my lovely wife's site here:Geekey Godmother printer unboxing.

The build itself went reasonably quickly though I will warn you that this is not a shake the box project. Taking your time and paying attention will reward you later on. Tolerances and alignment are important, fortunately the design makes it easy to make adjustments. One note for North Americans, there are a number of places where holes in printed plastic components need to be fettled - lightly reamed out by hand with a drill bit to remove any stray blobs of plastic inside. However, the components that need to go into those holes are metric. Finding metric bits proved to be much harder and more expensive than I expected. I ended up going with inch bits which worked well but I was very careful to use bits slightly smaller than their metric equivalent to avoid any sloppiness in fit.

The elecronics were straight forward but the electrics proved to be very fiddly requiring soldered connections to tiny pins. The design has been updated recently to simpler to wire and use plug connectors and I may switch over in the future. That is one of the strengths of the reprap design - it is easy to modify and update.

Having run several test and functional print with a single head. I am in the process of adding the two additional heads. For the moment, both will be for multicolour printing one each in .3 and .5 mm nozzle size. In time, the .5 will be switched over to multi-material  starting with nylon.

Anticipation

For an upcoming birthday, I am getting  a 3d printer. After much research I settled on the RepRapPro Tricolour Mendel. It strikes a nice balance between ease of building and advance features while not locking me into a commercial model.

WarPrinter may strike some as an odd name. My intent is not to print out illegal firearms but rather use the printer as an adjunct to my love of tabletop and miniatures war gaming.