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Oooh Errr that’s a Long One

Well as you know doubt guessed, I got nothing painted today, busy, busy, busy this morning and out gaming this afternoon. I did manage to hit print three times and ended up with a mighty fine cannon and crew (with another crew waiting to be cured).

I also have the (twelve miniature) unit of dwarf light infantry cured and ready for bases too. Tomorrow I think I am going to go for some dwarf artillery crews and a couple of swivel guns and an organ gun. Then I think I need to sit down and work out what I have and what I need. I will need to sort out some human cavalry as well as some more medium infantry, some flagellants and a unit of zweihanders too.

The beauty is that I have everything that I need to print them… I just need to decided, for example in the cavalry, I have demilancers, mounted crossbows (okay they are mounted infantry) Reiter’s with carbines and with pistols). Part of me now wants some elves to go with (or against) this lot. I suppose that I should put my sensible head on and paint what I have. I shall therefore be good and get them for a Christmas present.

I am going to try for an early night again tonight… as it is overcast it is a bit dusk like out there, but I shall be good and go to bed, I even turned the printer off to avoid getting sucked into messing around with that. Speaking of printers, it does seem to be behaving at the minute 🤞🤞🤞.

Tonight’s game was another hoot. The stranded crew ended up doing all kinds of weird things that upset the Working Joe’s they also found the missing NPC who had turned into some kind of weird monster courtesy of Weyland Yutani. They somehow managed to beat him, but before they could finish him off he managed to escape into the base. They then managed to steal the submarine and were last seen hurtling off into the depths… only to realise that the only way to escape is to use the long range communications array back in the base… which they sort of had to break to escape. So somehow they have to work out how to get into an undersea base that has a very angry scary monster and some working Joe’s who no longer seem that well disposed towards them… stress dice are certainly adding up… one of them has six already the other two have four…. what can possibly go wrong!

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A Night with the Printer

Tonight I decided to sort out the wash and cure pot of rather grubby ISO. This involved straining it through a funnel with a filter in. This got slower as the filter got gunked up more. I have my two settling jars, which actually work really well…. I just poured this straight into them. These leave a horrible sludge at the bottom, but I managed to get over half a litre of pretty clear ISO out of them. These are now refilled and I also have nearly a litre in a used bottle.

The Sludge is now sitting in the shed roof to get blasted by the sun. Once it cures then I will bin it.

I managed to get some more dwarves printed too. Here they are with the front rank…

I tried shrinking down the Iain Lovecraft dwarf Landsknecht to add into the dwarf force… but unfortunately, even though I reduced the size, he was still too bulky compared to the others, funnily enough the human version worked fine.

As the temperature has dropped a bit, I nicked the heater out of Esther’s office and stuck it in with the printer. I am printing a couple of sixes of light infantry (one after the other). Then I have a 10lb culvern and artillery crew to print tomorrow. After that another artillery piece and crew. I might actually get around to painting them too!

I knew I was knackered yesterday, I slept for 12 hours last night, I still feel a bit pooped just now. So it won’t be a late night tonight. Hence an early posting.

Tomorrow is the first proper day of leave, so I had better remember to turn off my alarms. I am hoping to get a really good go at the samurai tomorrow. My plan is to get going in the morning with them. I am still missing a bag of cavalry.. luckily I have a pile of leave to tidy up the shed and hunt for it.

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The Dwarves Muster

Tonight I worked a bit more on sorting out the Dwarves. So I now have a unit of crossbows, one of heavy infantry, one of ram cavalry and half a unit of medium infantry.

Part of the infantry force
Ram cavalry with a mounted commander bottom right

I have a few banners like this one too…

Dwarf heavy Infantry

I still have the light infantry to do, they are the ones in the quilted gambeson on the four bottom right miniatures. There are also a unit of hand gunners and an artillery crew too. I actually tried printing them off today along with the three bottom miniatures in the top photo. It would seem that the supports weren’t up to the task, as there was just the support left for the commander and the gunner was missing a leg. The supports were the really light weight ones, so I will do my own ones and see if that helps. You may have noticed that some of the above are a lighter grey. That is because I was running out of the original colour and poured white into the vat whist the print was going on. I have ordered some more grey, but I reckon that I will be having some white miniatures for a while until it arrives.

On a totally different note, what is thought to be the oldest evidence of a shark attack has been found in Japan. https://archit.web.ox.ac.uk/article/reconstruction-oldest-shark-attack-human-tsukumo-shell-mound-japan?fbclid=IwAR3GTHFwN96iBRHDz52dXq8N_C0_9gWiBZsSlBVad-FmeRg-hmbJb6WaVBQ

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Dwarf Cavalry

One of my poor rams has lost a leg 😢 somehow it didn’t print (might have got too cold) but anyway this evening I took matters in hand and made him a new one … or rather took the original ram and used mesh mixer to get rid of everything except the leg.

I have just printed it….

Prosthetic Ram leg…

I dropped it into the wire basket in the wash and cure and Lo and behold it fell through and I then spent 5 minutes with my hand in ISO and resin. Luckily I spotted it in a corner and managed to rescue it.

I also managed to print the dwarf commander in both his mounted and dismounted pose…

The extra rams head is for one of the other mounts. The spare arms are in case I couldn’t decide and the spares would then become available for other mounted troops. I am printing the last two cavalry now. Hopefully they will print ok overnight.

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A Bit on the Wobbly Side

I have sat for about 45 minutes trying to get the energy to get off my backside. I am hoping that I am not coming down with the thing the rest of the family has got.

For this reason I am having an early night. I am going to head off now and check how the second ram is doing on the printer, but the first one came off perfectly. Here they are…one and two. I thought I would show you the auto supports for the miniature. I tend to do an auto support then add more as necessary. In this case I think I forgot to change to light supports before slicing.

I need six in total for a cavalry unit in Dragon Rampant. These are just the same model reprinted. I will slice some more. They come with a lance, sword and mace as well as having four different bodies. A separate ram is available too. This means I could have mounted infantry. Come to think of it there might be an unarmoured ram too. I honestly cannot remember.

I am printing off another three two handed pole arms. Once these are done then I will count up what I have in terms of bodies and arms and print more arms as necessary.

Today I Went against tradition and actually bought some GW undercoat. I got lead belcher as I thought that I had a lot of armoured models to paint up. I will spray them metal and then paint the cloth and flesh white so that I can use the Contrast paint. I might totally regret this! So I will do one unit and see how I get on with it.

Two more days to go before the summer holidays. We had sports day (indoors) today and are having a leavers presentation tomorrow. Typically it is going to rain tomorrow so we might not be able to let the parents attend. I was doing it outside to allow them to see it… bloody weather has put paid to that.

My new teacher is coming for a visit tomorrow to meet the kids so that is something to look forward to.

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Printer Woes…Again

There are some days when there aren’t enough swear words in the world to suffice. I went to sort things out this morning and found some rather deep scratches on the glass bed…I managed to get two banners and a mace and shield off the plate, no miniatures were in evidence.

I haven’t got a clue where the scratches came from. The only thing I can think of is that something had got stuck to the vat and when I moved it then it scratched the glass. I tried printing again and although I got something off I still had failures. Now I forgot to reset the lift speed which might account for things. The scratches were in the same place as some of the failures but not all, so that might not be the cause…

I got a miniature off the bit where the centre scratch is…. here he is….

As things are upside down things look weird… the two missing figures should have been bottom left and the three missing pole arms bottom right. It is all a bit annoying and confusing. I will re level tomorrow and print six miniatures, each in a different place and see if I can work things out. wish me luck!

I did manage to finish the unit of twelve Dwarves…

I also ordered a pile more of these bases… hopefully they will come sooner rather than later.

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The Dwarves Muster

Today I managed to get some more Dwarves printed… All was going well until this evening when I went to print the last one (well actually three) with their banners…two of the three printed and the banner sort of did. So I relevelled and set it off again. Hopefully by tomorrow I will have something to show for it.

Anyway here are my heavy Infantry without their banner…

I also managed to get my rear rank of pike done… now interestingly there is one missing. Part of me now wonders if it failed and caused a problem in the vat…

I also have a large problem… The above is the last base I had! I am hoping that I can get some more, otherwise it is going to be an absolute sod if I have to change them into something else part way through. These came with my Flintloque miniatures and I transferred them onto 2p’s or mdf bases. I never thought I would actually run out of the unused bases.

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Shhhhh It’s Working!

Well after a bit of a wobbly few weeks, the printer seems to behaving itself (I know I have just doomed myself there). I relevelled yesterday and cranked the bottom layers to 7 in the hope that the model would adhere to the build plate and not the plastic… fingers crossed it is working. So far I am nine for nine on the success front. Here they are, they are going to be two separate units in the end. One unit of twelve pile and one of twelve halberdiers.

I am printing the same three pike at the minute to be the front rank. The second rank will be at attention. I will print another six random halberdiers too. Now I was having a look at Lion Rampant and this lot aren’t I. It as it seems to stop at the Wars of the Roses. I will have to have a mooch at some home brew ideas for the late Renaissance.

Now today Dave over on The Imperfect modeller had painted a very nice miniature with a Lion Rampant on the shield… I had mentioned how we see things today and how they were represented in the past… this is what I was talking about… here we see a modern representation of the flag of the Holy Roman Empire from around 1515 (I think)…

A rather funky two headed eagle, however this is an original painting from 1515… spot the difference…

Now a lad I knew from the re-enactment day’s was well into costume and has written a number of books about uniforms… he went to various museums and saw original kit from the early 19th century and made accurate representations of what he had found… no-one would buy it or was interested in it as It didn’t look good… Going back to the painting of the shield designs, I reckon not everyone was an artist… I rest my case… Lion Rampant on a shield!

One of my favourite ‘reference’ material is the ‘Morgan’ Bible here we see another Lion Rampant.

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Printing Failures and the Odd Success

Today I set away to print the last four arquebusiers… I sliced them and added them to the printer and set it away. I did four and Lo and behold it printed two! So after a bit of swearing I relevelled the print plate, remembering point six this time).

So after a bit of shopping I wandered back into the shed to find the bloody thing hadn’t printed a thing. So after muttering under my breath, or rather blaspheming loudly, I relevelled again and set it off…. this time I came back early on and found this time it was only printing one of them. So I pulled the plug and relevelled the bed again.

This time I got another set of three figures to print. These are the halbediers… as I set it away I bumped the number of layers up to 7, in the hope that it will adhere to the metal rather than the FEP. I will find out in an hour if it has worked.

But anyway this is where we have got to so far with the army…

To the left the crossbows and the right the guns. My plan is to have another unit of crossbowmen…. I had better read the army lists before I go wild with units. With this Kickstarter I certainly have a lot of choice!

I also tried painting something different… a bust of an elf witch…

I am not sure about the flesh tones, it cannot really be seen here, but it is a bit mottled. I will carry on with it tomorrow. Next up is The hair I think. It will be a light tan, as opposed to Galadriel’s colour in the Lord of the Rings films. I am thinking a kind of green colour for the dress.

I might even get some work done on the 6mm Samurai too!

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Gaming, Printing and Getting Wet

This evening we went off gallivanting into the Alien Universe again. The plucky trio were rescued by some androids who took them to an old research station, being the suspicious lot they were, they went exploring, the Androids didn’t seem to be bothered that they were wandering the old station. One of the NPC’s became unwell and ended up going into quarantine. Other rescued people were found…Russians so much waving of arms and drawing of ideas took place.. we left things when the unwell NPC went missing… someone in Weyland had given him an injection with a synthetic pathogen in it…He is now loose in a deserted underwater lab, that is partially flooded…. oh and the air scrubbers aren’t really working…

So when I got back I checked on the next lot of printees… I printed nine miniatures to add to the three from yesterday this would give me a unit of twelve…

Ooh look nine miniatures!

Looks like I will be reprinting s few more tomorrow!… i took a photo at 23.15…silly season is upon us again!

And finally… I signed up to be a head teacher to aid children in their education… having soaking wet underwear was not in the job description. A fire truck came today and they let the kids have a go at the hose jet… queue wet HT!

The last time I was this wet is when I went swimming,.. it was a weird wet though, basically half of my body was soaked, the other side was pretty much bone dry as children were in the way of the water… bottom line though was that the kids loved it.