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Monks and the Walls

Tonight I finished the monks, added some of the tufts I made, rather than add the ones I bought as they are totally different. They are nice and irregular shaped, but wouldn’t match in with the ones before.

Here are the monks amongst the hills

The other thing I did was to work on some of the 3DAlienWorlds walls. Rather than print then build I decided to build in 3D builder and then print them. This was a bit fiddly. Once the tops and bottoms were merged I Shrank them down to about 16% and printed them. This is them in the foreground.

Now I felt that they were a bit small so I bumped them up to 130%… Seen at the back of the photo below.as

As these are a bit tricky to see, I put them side by side.

Personally I prefer the larger one, but wondered what other people thought. The Files are saved so it isn’t a problem to bump them up,. Part of me thinks make them a bit larger again as a man on a horse would never get out of that gate 😂

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Monks Nearly Finished

Tonight I worked on finishing the Monks. I still need to get the bases flocked but otherwise I think they are done. No doubt as soon as I look at the photo I will realise that I missed something!

I also cracked on with the individual samurai. They are going to take a while I would imagine

Pete asked how the road wars miniatures compare to Irregular. Well I don’t have any of the Irregular vehicles but I can compare the miniatures…

Tomorrow I will try and get some more done on the Samurai, before my Baccus ones arrive!

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Mercy Sakes Alive

Looks like we got us a convoy… yes some more 6mm loveliness arrived this morning all the way from the USA.

Was the dark of the moon on the sixth of June
In a Kenworth pullin’ logs
Cab-over Pete with a reefer on
And a Jimmy haulin’ hogs
We is headin’ for bear on I-one-oh
‘Bout a mile outta Shaky Town
I says, “Pig Pen, this here’s the Rubber Duck
“And I’m about to put the hammer down”

Yes Convoy is one of my favourite films… I have it on DVD and haul it out to watch every so often… One of the best Theme songs ever…

Back in the Day I had a CB and used to belong to the Citizens Band Radio club in the village where I lived.

Although I love the Convoy Theme… this is a close second 😉

So enough of big rigs and CB Gibberish…. the other thing in my parcel was my Lizardmen cavalry…

These are the lizards riding Pachycephhlosaurus which I thought made a nice change from Utahraptors and the like. I did quite fancy some of the other big dinosaurs, but will have to wait a while for them.

This is the link to the website: https://www.microworldgames.com/ the shipping worked out at $12 which to be fair is about as some companies in the UK want to charge me for parcels to Shetland.

Tonight we got back into our RPG campaign suitably distanced. it was good to get playing again. Nobody died, even though they decided to spend 5 days wandering around the barrow downs… we shall continue with it next week.

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Teeny Tiny Monks and the Village

Today I was working on the monks and I got a phone call from a friend and colleague who moved away and was sitting on his own down country so they didn’t get as far forward as they could have done. But that’s okay, I would rather talk to him than finish these.

A bit of work tomorrow should see them finished, that is if I can move. I was mixing concrete by hand today and I have discovered muscles I never knew I had.

I put the buildings I have together so far…

This is what I aspire to …https://tenkafubu608971038.wordpress.com/2020/07/20/another-watchtower/

This blog is set up for Sengoku Jidai in 6mm so naturally I am following it. Some amazing terrain and minis not to forget some really interesting posts too.

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Resin Experiments

So after printing nearly 40 miniatures, a pile of 6mm buildings and a small ancient fleet I decided to print some test matrixes to help with the dialling in off the printer…

From left to right, top to bottom, we have 8.5 seconds, 9 seconds, 10 seconds and 14 seconds a layer. The 14 seconds is overexposed I think, but I may be totally wrong with that. From what I understand for circles and pegs you need to have the same amount of holes as pegs, for the bars at the bottom, the bars should technically be able to fit inside the slots below them and the two parts of the thing in the middle should just be touching, problem is they all look the same to me apart from the last one! Well I reckon I have until next Monday to ponder this as that is when the next bottle of resin will arrive.

Pete asked an interesting question about cost of resin over filament. There is definitely a difference. Resin cost me £29.00 for 500ml and filament was £25.00 for a one kilogram roll. Before lockdown the rolls were coming in at £18 a go. So there is definitely a price differential in place. However I have printed shit loads of things. Nearly 40 figures as well as my fleet and buildings so cost per thing is below 50p per item. There is a time differential as well. I can print six figures in the amount of time I could print one on the resin printer. Unfortunately the same cannot be said for the Ender. It would take six times as long to print the six miniatures.

I printed these for my eldest, just under 11 hours on the Ender (okay it was high quality)

Height determines the length of time on the Resin Printer.

I will get some of the resin stuff painted ASAP and also shove one onto the Ender and see what the difference is when painted up. A bit of a long journey, but I am enjoying it so far 😉.

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Teeny Tiny Monks

Tonight I Set about getting some paint onto the 6mm monks.

What with the resin printing and not baring able to be bothered then these got put onto the back burner a bit. There is still a long way to go with them, but at least I have made a start. The majority are in saffron robes, but I have thrown some grey and red in there too to add a bit of variety. I also added some Caucasian paint to the bearers at the back as they have now become my peasant bearers for my samurai army. I will probably cut off the armed man at the front and replace them with a samurai or Ashigaru miniature instead.

My Baccus order should be getting cast this week sometime. I am 20 orders beyond the last update so unless there are some massive orders in then I should be getting it next week.

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Further work on the Resin

Ok, first off I think I need to pull back a bit on the resin as tonight I realised that I have pretty much run out, my last print, drained the vat dry, which was not clever. I forgot to check before going out so now I have a pile of house roofs and only one house to put it on. I have, however,got a cunning plan. I will use the broken roof and semi printed buildings to make a burning village… well I think that is what I am up to with it.

The burning buildings will go with these ones…

Resin versus Filament. At this stage I really cannot tell the difference. The one weird thing on the resin is that one of the houses is actually slightly Smaller than the other ones. Another weird thing is that the roofs just about fit. This will be easily sorted as I can print the roof at 51% and the house at 50%. I did manage to print a couple of Tori gates this evening, but sadly the bridge failed, for some reason one end detached from the build plate. In the background you can see the fawn I printed for my daughter as she wants to add it to a diorama.

I put all of the villagers together today… errr there are rather a lot!

No wonder I ran out of resin!

I have ordered a couple more bottles of resin, so nail it comes I am going to be pretty much painting things 😂

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Further Resin Experimentation

Today I did some more miniatures on the Resin Printer. The one thing I have learned is that I am going to have to up my game in the post printing stage. Although I was trying to avoid the ISO, I think I am going to need it to get rid of a lot more of the liquid resin off the miniatures.

I will do some more testing tomorrow with the meths and see if that will work and if not then I will need to get some more ISO in.

In the first picture we have a merchant, lamp lighter, jailer, spearman, sailor and rat catcher. In the second we have a villager and a troll thingy (brain dead and can’t think of the name) and then we have a mix of spearmint and archers with a lone guard and another jailer. The last lot were done at 10 seconds a layer.

Tomorrow I think I will do an individual figure at different time per layer. It will probably be something small (and faster) and really try to get things clean.

Wish me luck!

My eldest wanted to do some sea creatures today but unfortunately, I had a support failure. It was the first time I had tried supports, so that will be the next thing to master after cleaning things.

The one thing that just struck me as I was about to sign off is that I am still printing at the standard resolution for the printer. I haven’t actually tried higher resolution. Something to ponder the future.

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Wearable Dioramas

Today I put my resin fish to good use and made some jewellery.

I had a lot of fish (and a turtle) hence the number of pendants and soon to be pendants..

These were nice and relaxing to do.

Basically a layer of cured resin and then some basing sand, more resin then the fish or whatever with the foliage., more resin then some of the leaves I made ages ago and then topped off with more resin.

My favourite one.

Me doing this caused pretty much the rest of the family to want to do something too. So my youngest is going to do a pond inside a box. My wife and eldest are doing something in a couple of clean jars. So all in all my messing around ended up being a six hour crafting session.

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Something Fishy

Today I painted up some koi, I am going to make something with them tomorrow.

I also found some photos… Pete painted up some Dutch lancers For his Waterloo diorama and Today I found a picture of the Polish Lancers … this was after we adopted one as he was on his own…

I even dressed up as a Cowboy once for a charity event.. took my horse too!