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Having a Night Off… Sort of

I am absolutely knackered tonight so decided not to try and paint anything. I have rescued a print off the printer and also sliced a few more. Now interestingly this print had four bases on it and only one came off perfectly (more of that later). So this miniature is the wight prince…

Not that you can really see him in the green resin… you will have to trust me, but it is a really nice miniature.

As I said above I printed him and his base plus three more bases. I managed to sort of get a Second one off the plate, but it was pretty badly warped and then there are the other two. One was completely non existent and the second one was a lump on the bottom of the vat.

So tonight I sliced half a dozen bases and when the bottom layer was curing only four showed up on the screen, then weirdly on the second layer the other two suddenly appeared. I have another 15 minutes or so to go before they are finished so it will be interesting to see what they are like. The only thing I can think of is that the missing two weren’t actually touching the ‘build plate’ in the software.

Yey.. they worked

Luckily they came out okay, I did pull the plug on them as it was actually going to be another hour to make the wall a few mm higher…. and quite frankly I wanted to go to bed. It didn’t happen until just now as my daughter needed help with her maths homework!

I am now in the process of printing Gandalf, Frodo and Samwise (and a cat) overnight. I will show them off tomorrow.

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Samurai Houses

You will be pleased to hear that there have been no injuries, wounds or anything like that today.

I did a bit of slicing for the resin printer so that took up some time, especially when I messed up the thing and forgot to save it!

Anyway so I got s bit of green on the houses and stuck some tufts on a couple of the thatched roofs…

I also got a bit more done on the stone walled buildings…

These aren’t as nice as the 3DAlien world ones and will probably be replaced when they bring out some town buildings. I still need to get more shading done on the roofs. I did some but to be honest you cannot really see where I put it. The one thing that is missing is the gates for the stone walls. The only thing I can think of is that I popped them in with some buildings when the castle went off to its new owner… my thought process was that I could probably redo them on the printer… evidently I forgot!

I got a bit of bits put on this lot and started on replacing the reins on the horse…

And finally for this evening, Tom’s River Lady and a Hobbit Costermonger…

These have literally just come out of the curing station…. I am trying the wight prince overnight so we will see how it gets on. Should be ready when I awake in the morning 😉.

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Tom and the First of the Nine

So the printer is still working, so much so that I actually managed to do another miniature. I got the first of the nine done, unfortunately he lost a hand and rein in the printing process. Luckily a 15th Century Perry mini hand fitted just fine. I will get a Greenstuff rein added when everything has solidified.

As you can see from the above I also managed to get some paint on the bard miniature… he happens to be called Tom and lives near the old forest and has a water nymph as his wife. I still have a bit more to do on him, but he is definitely getting there.

Unfortunately yesterday when I was chopping back some bushes I got a bit of a smack in the eye. It stung like a bugger and then went away. This morning I could open the eye very easily and the pain was a bit painful to say the least. To cut a long story short then I decided I needed to rest it. Sadly my pirate patch mountain has disappeared so my wife came up with a cunning idea… wear my glasses but cover the sore eye lens… now I didn’t want to freak out my kids so I drew an eye on the tape….

Anyway lots of eye baths in salt water later this popped out…

Over the course of the day smaller bits have also come out, it is still stinging, but nowhere near to what it was this morning

The down side of having one eye covered is that depth perception is reduced… sadly stupidity cannot be blamed on it… guess what happened with the printed bases today?

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6mm Samurai Houses, Printers and ships

Tonight I decided to finish the samurai village houses, by finish I mean do the wood work, still a whole lot of things to do on them but at least it is something.

I still have the tiled roof ones to do (woodwork there too) but I will try and get them going tomorrow.

On the printer front the old resin one seems to be working again. I reformatted a completely different card and tried a new sliced file on it and away it went. So here is hoping that by tomorrow morning then I will have something on the build plate. The one thing I have noticed recently is a flexible build plate being advertised for resin printers. This would be an absolute godsend as I am sick of having to use a Stanley knife blade to get things off. The FDM has been working on more hex tiles too…

And finally Boats…or rather ancient ships. If you remember yesterday I had spent ages looking for a box of cardboard ships. Evidently I have dumped the ones I had made and put the unmade sheets into an envelope… I found them today purely by chance…

You can see from the above how munch bigger things are going to need to be to make them 1/300 scale. At least I now have a measurement to play with, and we all know that I am going to print at least one to try it out🥴… prepare for the swearing 😂.

Evidently the Northern Lights have been spotted tonight. Unfortunately the bit that fastens the camera to the tripod has disappeared. My Daughter loaned me a short stubby tripod, but it meant I needed to sit it on top of things… the highlight of the evening was me swearing as to why with a 30 second exposure with a high speed ISO I wasn’t getting anything… I tried and tried and tried again then realised that I had left the lens cap on!

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Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

See I am a bit cultured… and in the words of Sir Samuel Vimes… We watch each other.

I suddenly remembered these chaps when I was considering what to paint…

I am going for a really simple colour scheme of green and browns, with iron metallics. They aren’t going to win any prizes, but they are going to painted and will look pretty at a distance.

It was a rather nice drive home today, so I stopped and took a photo of the view from the top of Weisdale hill.

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An Eclectic Mix

This evening I pretty much jumped around a fair bit from 6mm to 28 to tiles. But I got some decisions made and actually made progress.

First up, while hunting for some MDF bases I ate across a nice square base in hardboard that I had cut for a large Arabic tent for my 10mm Arabs, but it has now changed continents from Africa to Asia and will the base for my Samurai General.

As you can see, everything is merely blue tacked down to try it out. There are still four samurai guards to add to this. This will be for the main Daimyo. In game terms I will do up a standard size base to denote the same character in the fight.

The next thing I did was to get some spray paint onto the Hexon tiles….

There are still a whole load more in the box under the back lot. I will get these sprayed over the weekend. There are probably ninety all told, with more on the way.

Finally on the painting front…

Just the bases to do on these and then that is another half dozen finished.

I spent a good proportion of this evening looking for my 6mm cardboard ships as I wondered how big a 3D printed one was going to have to be, Lo and Behold I couldn’t find the bloody things anywhere! I got a pile printed onto card, but only ever made a couple of triremes (I think). they are from the Roman Seas range from Hotz Stuff.. I got mine from RPG now… https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/20290/Roman-Seas-The-Carthaginian-Navy-Set?manufacturers_id=506

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Baccus with the Samurai Again

So tonight I had a mooch in the 6mm box from Baccus and decided to try some base sizes for the command set.

I have two options…

The small one looks pretty naff and overcrowded where the larger one looks more open, but a bit narrow… these really are the only sizes of MDF bases that I have available. I think I am going to have to print something to make things fit.

I will have a look to see if I can find something nocking about, but I am not holding my breath.

Now I suppose that I could miss out the honjin screens, but that really isn’t very Japanese if I do.

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Deliberate Small Scale Agriculture

So after last night little foray into Greenstuff fields for the hex tiles I decided to have another go this evening but with an added farmhouse done in3D Builder. I messed it up a bit in that I didn’t push the whole thing down far enough so then there was an edge visible which looked a bit naff. So I covered it in Greenstuff fields and a dodgy hedge.

On the Bleurgh front, I think I will be back to work again tomorrow. Not exactly 100% but enough to get going again.

Hopefully I can get things painted again soon…

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Small Scale Accidental Agriculture

Today was another day pretty much spent in bed going bleurgh or other noises associated with feeling crap. But I did manage to go and hit print on the printer again. Unfortunately we had a power cut and guess what happened? Yep the printer stopped mid print. Now I had the option to carry on the print and I did consider it, even going as far as starting to heat up the bed and nozzle.

But then it struck me. I wanted to add some fields in Greenstuff to a flattish tile, and providence had provided a pair of them.

I quickly hit stop print and got them off the build plate. Now they still had holes where hills and woods were meant to go, so that became the basis for my field location.

So without further ado, I give you three crop rotation in small scale…

Now this idea is in no way, shape or form my idea. It came from a very talented chap by the name of Adam Clark over on the Hexon Hills Facebook group. He did something similar a good while ago and he very kindly sent me a link to a tool he has produced over on Thingiverse…- https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4603809. You can see his villages on there too.

Now when he first started he used wire wrapped around a block. I couldn’t find a block or wire so used a round lollipop stick and some nylon string.

Now it is, to be fair a little crude, but it did do the job… I do intend to print the stamp very soon. Once I feel a bit better I will mess around in 3D Builder and nab some buildings to make small hamlets to go with the fields.

I managed to get a bit of work done on the wights too…

They will soon be finished. Unfortunately I cannot print any more as the resin printer is still sulking and Anycubic have unfortunately not replied, problem is, they haven’t even sent a holding email to say “whoops, Sorry we are snowed under!” therefore I don’t know whether anyone has received my plaintive email full of woe.

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All Wight, Here we Go

Hello and apologies in advance for the ringing of the damn bell, but unclean, unclean certainly springs to mind. Whatever I have got, has pretty much knocked me flat for another day. Spent a couple of hours this morning sorting out other people’s cock ups at work, not my team in school, elsewhere and it knocked me for six. I went to bed at 13.30 for a lie down and woke up at 18.45.

Anyway after oven roast sausages and mash I felt well enough to throw some paint on these fine fellows…

Still a fair bit to go but definitely over the hump now.

I also managed to get a bit of paint on these…

Hopefully I will feel a bit better tomorrow, I won’t be at work which is a right pain, but nobody wants me sneezing and snotting over them.