Finished: Walkways for Judge Dredd

 

After, errmmm, a few weeks the walkways are finally finished. Putting the three extra sets together for a few photos was fiddly enough, so I didn't do another arrangement with the original set added in.

I included a few figures to show the scale...

There are a couple of bits from the three sets missing from the photos as there wasn't space to include them in the arrangement:

That's two upper stairs and one long railing. With different arrangements they will get used.

With the terrain finally finished, I will be switching back to painting figures once I've given my airbrushes a good clean - they've seen a lot of use over the past few weeks.

Paint Table Saturday 28 May 2022

 

The last board for the walkways and it's almost finished. I just have the red railings and some touching up of the steps to go - they will be done tomorrow, so there might be a post of everything set-up.

Here's a quick photo of  everything that has been finished:

On the 3D printer front, I'm almost there on the fine-tuning. There's one more set of tests that I need to do, and a few more that would be useful to do but which aren't urgent. Here is a photo of all the bit's I've printed during the process so far:

As you can see, lots of cubes and little boats (I tried them and found that they were just as useful as the full size ones, but printed a whole lot quicker!). The set of nine cubes and nine little boats were done today to compare different print speeds.

Wednesday Workbench 25 May 2022

 

I'm very nearly done with the airbrushing stage - just two boards left to do the red on. I might have got them finished today if I'd remembered that the grey I'd used before was a mix (3 parts Wolf Grey: 1 part Sombre Grey) before I'd done all of the bits with Sombre Grey.

I have been doing some more 3D printing since Saturday:

Airborne Jeep

This was re-scaled from 1:100. This was the third attempt, using standard supports. Those turned out to be a nightmare to remove. I'm going to have to play around with those to see if I can get a decent print.

28mm Air Rafts

I ended up with two of these. Having printed one, I had a silly idea of printing an extra middle section to make it a four-seater:

I'd forgotten about the trim though, so I just printed extra front and rear sections to make up a second.

For the past two days I've been running calibration tests to fine tune the printer. I'm very nearly done with that. 

Paint Table Saturday 21 May 2022

 

Well, that's the black priming done. I started dry-fitting the bits ahead of doing the zenithal priming, but soon realised that my idea of painting everything un-assembled wasn't going to work. As a result I have been gluing the stairs and railings this evening.

I've solved the problem I was having - it seems I'd set my Z-offset too low, so the first layers were getting squished. Yesterday I reprinted the 1:270 Scout Courier; I also printed a 30 Ton Gig and some flight stands.

I did some more printing today. I had received a couple of 28mm ship crew figures as freebies and decided to try rescaling them down to 1:100 and 1:270. 

The 1:270 scale figures are a bit spindly and fragile - I think I'll need to rescale the X and Y axes less so that they end up a little chunkier.

I also printed the 1:270 scale 200 Ton Free Trader:

The ships are from a Traveller RPG Kickstarter I backed last year. I've got a lot more to print over the coming months, including some 28mm ones (with interiors). I'll start with some smaller prints first until I get used to the printer.

The Source of My Recent Distraction....

Yesterday I included a teaser pic of a box. There were actually four boxes delivered yesterday, two each from IKEA and Amazon; the teaser pic was one of the Amazon boxes as that was the source (and hopefully resolution) of my recent distraction, the other boxes were ancillary to it.

I'm sure you all want to know what it was. Well, are you ready?

Are you?

Are you sure?

Are you really sure?

Are you really, really, really sure?

OK, I'll put you out of your misery...

A 3D printer. After much research (watching lots of YouTube videos, browsing websites, etc), I settled on the Anycubic Kobra for a variety of reasons:

• Price
• Delivery time
• Footprint
• Build-plate volume
• Ease of set-up and use
• Reviews

The other main contenders were the Anycubic Viper (the footprint would have been slightly too big) and the Prusa Mini+ (smaller build-plate volume, longer wait for delivery plus all the hassle with importing from the EU).

The Vyper might have been a better option, but the only desks I could find that were deep enough for it were too wide to fit in the space I have available.

The printer arrived first, followed quite rapidly by the desk. I couldn't assemble the printer until I had built the desk, so I cracked on with that job, which took me about two hours. After a break for supper, I assembled the printer. It took under half and hour including all the checks for belt tightness, plate tension, gear tension etc. Once that was all complete, I placed the printer on the desk and plugged it in. After about half an hour I had the auto-leveling and Z-axis offset done and clicked to start printing the model included on the SD card. 

While that was printing I downloaded and installed Cura 5.0 slicing software (for converting STL files to the G-code for the printer), set up the printer in that and played around with some of the STL files I have acquired over the past year or two.

Today I printed off a few files. While doing so I discovered a few little issues with my Cura settings and made the necessary adjustments. This is (almost) everything I have printed today:

The Owl

This was the file that came on the SD card with the printer. It took a little over two hours to print.

"Tactical Scale" Scout Courier

"Tactical Scale" is what 2nd Dynasty call their ships designed to work with 1" hex grids (rather than making them to an actual scale)

1:270 Scout Courier

This one prints in three parts - fore, aft and turret. The Fore and Aft connect with an OpenLock clip; the turret can be added using a short length of printer filament, allowing it to rotate. I'm having a slight issue with this one as there is a gap between the Fore and Aft when the clip is inserted. I think I might have identified the problem no, but will wait until tomorrow to test my theory.

10mm Orcs Warriors

Late last year, Curt sent me some STL files of 10mm Orcs that he wanted me to paint up for him. The plan is to get them printed in resin, but I thought I'd try printing them to see how they came out on an FDM printer.

I printed these at 0.1mm layer height at 50% speed. They came out quite nicely, although you can see the layer lines. I might try printing them again at 0.06mm layer height to see how that comes out. The biggest problem was removing the supports - PLA+ filament isn't as brittle as resin. You can see from the photos above that there is still a bit of clean-up to do on them.

Well, that's that. Of course, now that I have this, I may find myself distracted by getting used to the software and hardware. Luckily, with the print times for some of the things on my initial list I will have time to keep going with other hobby stuff.

Wednesday Workbench 18 May 2022

 

As you can see, I've made a start on priming the walkways. Once everything has had an initial black layer, I will dry-fit the various bits and do the zenithal priming. I'll probably reach that stage on Saturday.

As you know, I've been rather distracted of late. That should all be over now, at least until the next distraction comes along, thanks to the arrival today of this:

Just a teaser for today; I should have a full post about it tomorrow.

Finished: Mega City One Buildings (and some other bits)

 

I finished painting these last night, but waited until today for photography so that I could make use of the lovely daylight that was forecast. Luckily, the forecast was good!

That's enough of the scene-setting, onto some glamour shots!

Pre-Fab Beta

Pre-Fab Alpha

The extra complete ground floor:

The extra ground floor with doors from Blotz:

Extra cantilever and two bridges:

Large Crates

Street Lamps

Five new ones:

Four originals, now with acrylic lamps:

Original and new, side-by-side:

Having been a little disappointed by how the OSL effect turned out on the originals, I decided to try applying it after airbrushing a thin layer of white. I think it turned out much better.

Tomorrow I will start priming the extra walkways. Having learnt my lesson, I'll be doing them as sub-assemblies.