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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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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 on the Night

So after sleeping until pretty much late afternoon I managed to drag myself out of bed and before heading back there I decided to try and get a bit done on the wights… I succeeded in getting some paint on them.

Not a lot to be honest, but a bit of progress is still progress.

Now one thing on these that is puzzling me is that there are radiating layer lines on the bases and on the miniatures themselves, I am not sure why. It will be a setting in the slicer, but as yet I am not sure what or why.

The printer is still Kerfucktenbuggerd as they say (or not say) in Germany. I have got onto Anycubic to see if they have any answers. Hopefully they will come back with one soon.

I managed to get a couple of sets of roads printed as well.

The roads are the six at the front, I still need more, but it’s a start.

So we have 33 tiles in the coffee colour and about 60 I think in the pink. Quite a little world so far.

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Fifteen Hours Plus

I got the wights off the resin printer this evening after 15 hours 49 minutes. This was a bloody age, so this evening I checked the software and for some reason I had set the layers as 0.01mm at 8 seconds a layer… what a pillock!

To be honest you cannot really see what they are…

They are lovely miniatures and will be a lot more visible when I get them sprayed tomorrow. These are pre supported and they just come right off.

The miniatures had four minutes cleaning in the ISO and then had a good old blast with the UV light.

Tomorrow I am going to print the bases for the dogs etc as well as print a hobbit with his giant pumpkin.

I did another couple of river tiles on the FDM this evening.

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Khmer Super, Almost Nearly Done

Tonight I got the flock on but my quick drying basing Glue wasn’t so the tufts will have to wait until tomorrow…

This is a nice colourful army. I now just have to find someone to fight it, an order to Irregular might be in order with some Burmese making an entrance. Not for a while though as I still have a fair old bit to paint.

I was on a bit of a roll tonight and found some of my 28mm in the box so got some duds painted on the duds… I wonder where the word duds meaning clothes comes from.

These miniatures aren’t brilliant in terms of the printing, but because I am a stingy bugger then they will get used come what may 😂.

So from left to right we have a villager with a sack, a sailor, a lamplighter, a rat catcher and a lady with a barrel. I will carry on with them tomorrow.

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A Bit more Printing

The advantage of working from home meant that I could press print more than once on the Ender 3.

Spot where the lake is going to go!

I am going to print a fair few more of these as well as some roads. Still not sure what I am going to do with them😉. Doing small runs is a good way to get things going in the right direction. My first ones were one of each tile so I got some that I probably won’t use. Choosing specific tiles makes it easier to get a map that I want.

I also set about printing some resin miniatures, you will have to wait until tomorrow to see them as the print time was 14 plus hours, so they are going to finish sometime around 02.30.

I am printing the Hunter, his two dogs and the town guard…

Once these have finished I have got a couple of wights to print.

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Printing not Painting

This evening I couldn’t get access to the table to do any painting as my offspring were sorting out some things that they have sold. So I used time to get some hexes sliced in Cura. I have broken them down in to one and two tiles at a time. This is two fold, it gives me more chance to get things done in an evening 3 hours instead of 8 and also if the printer plays silly buggers then I haven’t lost as much filament.

I have gone for roads and hills, with rivers and woods. The woods are in singles and the others are in pairs.

The darker coloured ones are the ones from last night. 8 hours 48 minutes and voila, six useable tiles. They are the plains tiles.

Right now I am printing a wooded hex.

I Have added these boats for Eloth as he was asking for a better view of them. Grey is resin and yellow is filament.

Full size and 50%

The above resin ones were my first ever and it was in these I learned the need to properly clean the resin from the prints. To be honest though the filament although slower and less detailed is a whole lot cheaper.

I really do fancy increasing the size to 1:300 so that I can stick some 6mm Greeks on them. 😂 I need help I really, really do.