Welcome to 2016 fellow gamers! I hope we all had the Xmas servitors (or our understanding better halves!) bring us something nice. I was fortunate to have my long suffering but understanding wife give me a 3d Printer for Xmas this year and its been a roller coaster ride learning exactly what can be achieved.
Lets kick off with some pictures and some info shall we!
This first pic is mostly the smaller test runs I completed with the hot pink sample ABS plastic the unit came with. The logo and the spiral vase are sample prints from the printer memory but the rest of it is from free files I found online. From left to right we have a pair of tiny Tardis, a wall section for a 28mm corridor battle game (more on that later), a turn counter, the 3d logo, the spiral vase, a little power generator, a 2″ square industrial crate, a 2″ industrial dome and a sandbag line. Each was printed at various micron levels – between 0.4 and 0.1mm per layer – depending on what I was doing at the time. I had a couple of minor issues with a couple of the prints but as I reprinted them I will cover them in the coming pics.
Its a little hard to see here but we have a fairly large water tank (with removable top) as well as a 40k wrecked dreadnaught with separate back power pack. The finish on the dread is pretty rough as I left the settings to default (0.3mm layers) and while as a test it was a success – I will probably reprint him in the future.
We have 3 Eldar terrain pieces here as well as the first really important piece of learning. The pink arch on the left was the last of the sample plastic I got and I loaded the black one I had on hand straight after. I had previously tried to print the arch on a smaller scale (this one is nearly 5″ tall!) and it had collapsed. When I inspected the file I found a support had been added to it for printing and I am convinced the position and size of the support led to the first one failing. After finding the raw file and letting the printer software add what it needed it printed fine! The 2 smaller ones were also printed the same way and worked a treat. They need some clean up yet but I am happy with the finish overall.
My first two, 6″ square tiles for Zone Mortalis. They need some work to clean them up and add some details but I am now going to see about making a 3 foot square board using them! Scale wise they are spot on so now its setting the printer to go as much as I can! The wall section in the first image is one of these tiles I had tried early in the testing which failed – only the wall survived while the flat section curled and was unusable.
Here we have a doozy of a print – again at 0.3mm layers – a size accurate wrecked rhino! The details are a little obscured (like the lights) but the seats inside are there and the panel behind the driver as well! It took about 9 hours to print at this setting – it was going to take nearly 30 hours at 0.1mm per layer! I am really keen to sand and clean this up to get some paint on it and see how it come ups!
So – 3d printer – any good for home? Yes! Just not for models yet. I have found files for various 28mm scale miniatures online and none look great when printed. I might even download one and print it just to show you all if you are interested! Let me know in the comments if you want to see it! If you find a cool STL file that you would like to see printed I am also open to suggestions from you – email me the file (zipped of course) or send me a link and I will see what I can do.
Its really exciting technology to have on hand and you will no doubt be seeing more of it in coming posts throughout 2016. Unfortunately as of the time this is posted – the printer is waiting on a warranty claim as the glass printer base has chipped after just 1 month of use! It seems a pretty common issue so should be resolved pretty quickly and I will be back top printing cool stuff soon!
In the mean time, alongside my heresy projects and harlequins – my new Tournament army has started to take shape… you will see more in the next post!
