Eve Of Challenge Post

 

Yes, folks - tomorrow is the start of AHPC XIII. I am once again participating as a, errr, participant and also doing minion duties. For those of you who follow the Challenge, I am not going to be the Senior Flight Attendant this year. Instead I will be the Senior Studio Tour Guide, to fit in with the theme of this year's Bonus map.

As you can see from the photo above I have my painting desk set up and ready to go in the morning. I haven't decided yet what figures will hit the table first - I have a few choices. Whatever I decide on, it will have to be something quick so that (if possible) I can get a post submitted on Day One. The next one will also need to be a quick job as I will be heading off to Sussex on Friday morning and don't want to leave figures partially painted.

Before setting the painting desk up, I took some photos of what I've primed and 3D printed since my last post:

Primed Stuff

That's the three Judge Dredd busts I printed a while ago, the Kleggs (replacements for the missing parts were received a couple of weeks ago) and some 3D printed figures from 2nd Dynasty. For the last set, I decided to try printing the pre-supported models intended for resin printers - they looked OK-ish, but once primed I realised how bad the layer lines are on them:

As there is no way of overcoming that with painting, I'm going to scrap those. Having seen them primed, I also printed one figure without the pre-supports but using the ones from the slicer software. I haven't primed it yet. I suspect that I will end up having to find someone with a resin printer to print them for me to get a decent quality for painting.

I'm still printing out Traveller cargo containers:

Sealed

Controlled Environment

Standard

I've got all the Sealed and Controlled Environment containers I'll ever want; I need a few more to fill that board of Standard containers. And then I'll want to fill one or two more boards of Standard containers! When these are done (sometime tomorrow) I will have on each board: 6 x 2 Ton, 6 x 4 Ton and 2 x 6 Ton containers. Any extra containers I print will be the 4 Ton ones.

I also decided to try re-scaling some of the small "crate" size items to container size:

Quad Gas Cylinders, 1 Ton

Gas Can, 4 Ton

Yesterday, I was coming to the end of a spool of filament. there wasn't enough left to do any containers, so I thought I'd print another grave bike. Each bike takes 3 prints (the bike, the windshield and the stand). I'd printed one stand and underestimated how much filament was remaining - I didn't think there was enough to do the rest of one bike, but enough to print another stand. When that was done, I had enough left to print a third stand - if I'd estimated better I would have had enough to print one complete grav bike.  However, with two complete bikes already printed (one I have posted, one I haven't) I decided to print two windshields. There was still a bit of filament left so I did a quick print of something else, changed spools and then printed two bikes. Here are the three bikes you haven't seen before:

Over the next three months, I will mostly be blogging twice a week - you'll get my Wednesday Workbench posts and on Saturday's there will either be a post of my submissions for that week (my assigned posting day is Friday) or a progress update.