Adventures into 3D

I have been thinking about a 3d printer for a little while but they seamed rather expensive however i did find a UK supplier which sold a pre built one for less than £200 , it was a basic model so no heated bed and a smallish build volume however since this was my first go at this sort of thing i went and ordered it.

It arrived in just short of 2 weeks from date of purchase and it came with a free roll of PLA filament which would normally retail for about £20.

So here is my first go at printing something , i did some scaling down to the size of model that a wanted , had a few failures but that was just that the bet was not quite level and not using the glue stick as the plastic stuck down so hard a spent a little while chiseling off the melted plastic.

the next results were a-lot better

I learnt a little from this , for instance the spanner was to small to work , the gaps created were too close together and the ladys arm was too thin , and messed up the scaling on the T72

But after what i had learnt over this time stood me in good stead and did some 15mm vehicles from thingverse , this is how they came out of the printer after about 8 hours

I found that you have to pick the right spots to start removing the support material of you could snap off the smaller mouldings , another learning curve

and after a clean up i was really pleased with the quality

So i have started a new project which will be a 15mm force on force game for the cold war / 21st century. , i have worked out that if i print about 30 vehicles i would have paid for the printer , well just had a little measure and to date i have used 25% of my 1kg roll so by that costing all my prints and all the mistakes i have made while learning have cost me £5 plus about 5-6 hours per model in time to print

here are another 3 prints for my Russians

My next lot to do are a T90, BMP-3 and a ZSU23-4

Done some more work and made another mistake , well it is a learning curve , I modified a free 3ds 

(i split the turret from the hull) file for the ZSU 23-4 but made the guns and radar supports too small so the print did not work very well but never mind i replaced them with pins and a few other issues need a little sorting

Thought i would try something smaller , this was a scaled down BMP -3 to 1/285

The detail was not bad on the surfaces but the tracks and wheels were a bit of a disaster , these were printed in this direction with a raft all my other models were done standing on their rear side with a raft

Here are my latest models

started on some terrain all of which were rescaled for 15mm

Rather pleased with these prints , a stryker at 15mm , 10m and 6mm from the same stl file

a closer pick of the 10mm and 6mm

Well had some nice success with my 1/285 Stryker unit

done the infantry as well though they were not very well affixed to base so scrapped this idea

 Start of my next project is to play Advanced Squad leader with miniatures , 1/285 scale on an enlarged mapboard

 Here are both 1/285 armies printed , painted and based

I have even designed some Russian buildings from scratch

Well i would like my own hind to go down the shops in unfortunately i had to make one as i couldn't afford a real one ( rotors by me ) and my heavily modified stl file to get it printed in this scale

Here it is in all its 1/285th scale

Made and armoured train for my ww2 polish

some 15mm buildings

my 15mm samurai village