So after the total balls up of printing things yesterday (including printing the carriage body at 75% instead of 85%) I had some success with the supportless miniatures… all printed perfectly…

So it was definitely down to user error when the failures were happening..buoyed by this knowledge I set off again to print the stagecoach bits… I came back to this…

Nope, dear readers I hadn’t removed the body from the supports…this was it… so after a bit of head scratching and resin filtering I struck upon an idea, use the supported version as a reference for the angle of the piece as well as where the supports are… I eventually obtained the correct sized coach body 😁

I am now printing the underbody where the wheels will fasten to.

I also remembered to spray the other Arbites white too…

And word to that effect… it has been a busy day, our local cinema reopened yesterday and their premiere was a play done by Shetland Youth theatre.. because I’d Covid Shennanigans it ended up being filmed. Really proud of my eldest as they were excellent in it.

However that is not the reasons for the Miffedness… I decided to print something so spent a good old while getting things into the build plate in the slicer. I filled it up… bad mistake!

This is what I started with…

And this is what I ended up with!

There is only one wheel, instead of four, no driver, no luggage or shield… not to mention no loops on the stagecoach pole…

So I have relevelled the thing, tested the screen and am now in the process of printing a pile of miniatures that require no support…

Problem is I have loads of these already…

But if these print fine then it is probably down to failed supports… fingers crossed!

I managed to salvage a couple of miniatures out of the a above…

Tonight I bit the bullet sand set up the new Resin printer… I thought I would do the sensible thing and print off the test prints…

I do think it looks rather smart with its green cover… this thing has about 50% more printing space than the Zero, which is a big plus.

He test rooks look like this…

Speaking of draining, some absolute pillock packed up the arm for the wash and Cure machine and sent it off when the printer got returned. Whoops! Luckily I still had the basket.

I also managed a bit of painting too.

These will probably have black boots, belts and gloves. Probably yellow helmets and chest decoration…not sure about the rest yet.

Tonight I spent a very long time hunting for circular bases and in the end found none, in a burst of inspiration… Suddenly I remembered that I had a small draw full of bases that I got with my Flintloque miniatures. Up until this evening I couldn’t think of a use for them. That changed tonight.

I actually really like these as the bases for the miniatures. I might actually use them for the Frost miniatures too. I will have to see how many I have, but I have ones for Infantry and cavalry as well as some bigger ones too, that might work for trolls etc.

I am going to get the printer up and running tomorrow. First thing I will do is the extra couple of miniatures to finish this squad off… I am quite nervous about it just in case it does t work properly.

Oh while I remember the RAV4 came back from the garage today, my pocket is lighter by £1055.88…ouchers!

It was a bit of a busy evening today, but I managed to get the second group of four bases done and then made a start on the third set.

They are flanked by the original four bases. There were a couple of transfers that really went on badly. The one directly behind the rearing bull went totally squint.

So as you know I went on the Frost Kickstarter, well Iain has done another Kickstarter through My mini Factory. And as I had backed the Frost I got a preorder discount, well for £21 I would be silly to give it a miss….

Here is the link if you want to go looking for yourselves….https://www.myminifactory.com/crowdfunding/iain-lovecraft-feywood-272?utm_source=Homepage&utm_medium=HP&utm_campaign=04-05-21_IC_Iain%20Lovecraft_Feywood%20Campaign_CF&pk_campaign=04-05-21_IC_Iain%20Lovecraft_Feywood%20Campaign_CF&pk_kwd=HP. interestingly enough since taking the above screen shot the total pledged has passed $22000 with 804 backers.i got on board about an hour after the thing started and I was 500 plus on the backer list… quite a popular set methinks!

Yes tonight I carried on with the next four bases… now to be honest I could have been a lot tidier at times. I may go over bits, but en masse the errors may not be noticeable….

Really just the shields (front and back) and the weapons to do. I decided on dyed linen cuirass for some of them. Tomorrow I should hopefully get this lot finished, including the shield fronts.

I came home tonight and got straight on with the caravan. I got it jacked up and got the first wheel off. With a bitter of nifty hammer work and WD40 on the brake cable I managed to get the wheel brake released. I took each nut off and put them in a bag, only to find when I came to put them back on again then one was missing. Luckily I have an old caravan in bits, so a wheel but was an easy sort out.

Second wheel gave me a little more trouble, but in the end we won.

Evidently I released the brakes as when I got up after throwing more WD40 at the back supports. I leaned against it and it shot forward. The Rav 4 couldn’t move it that easily so either I fixed them or I should change my name to Hercules!

It truly has been a bit of a crap day, the loss of Smudge has been tempered a bit by the knowledge that we will be getting a kitten in a couple of months.

The vet was lovely, she allowed us in the room with him when he went, she wasn’t supposed to, due to Covid restrictions, but it really did help us.

We have had him since 2005. We hand reared him and half the litter from about a week old. He was the runt if the litter and the vet warned us that he might not see out the night. Ironically he is the last survivor of the litter. When they came to us they were dirty grey wriggling things. They had been fed cows milk and kept in newspaper, so they got a bath in an ice cream tub. He is called smudge as we couldn’t get the muck off his nose, then we realised he was actually black and white.

We lost the first of his litter at six weeks and tabby at 9 years… he was called tabby as he was the tabby kitten that we weren’t keeping…🙄.

He would have been sixteen this October, my wife was heavily pregnant when we got them, she reckoned that as she couldn’t sleep then she might as well feed kittens overnight.

So here he is the daft old softy…

So this evening I managed to get somewhere with the first four bases of heavies…

Nowhere near finished, but definitely a lot less white on them than yesterday… there is a great deal of bronze on these, as one might expect. Hopefully the shield transfers will brighten the front ends up a bit.

I got a parcel today, my new motherboard has arrived…

I am a bit nervous putting it in, as the printer is still under warranty… okay to be fair we are sitting at 10 months since I had it, so the warranty is close to the end, but this is new tech too and, although I have built a pc years ago, I am just a bit twitchy that I will balls it up.

I decided not to do it this evening as I wanted something to distract me tomorrow, unfortunately my old cat, who we hand raised from two weeks is having to go to the vets, and I am thinking that it will be a one way journey for him. He is now 16 years old and his mental faculties are really starting to go, he will start shouting for us when he has lost us, problem is we are in the room with him. He will then chase me to feed him, after I have just fed him. He is starting to poop wherever he is, often a couple of feet away from the litter tray, we have so many now because he was doing it in every room. He attacked the dog yesterday for no apparent reason… as. A vet friend said, better a day to early than a day too late. I know it is for the best, but my kids are going to be devastated. I really do think we have run out of straws to clutch at.

So today in my lunch break I got a notification to say that Kickstarter needed something… so I duly went online, did what I needed to do and then noticed something….

I resisted for all of about 30 seconds! Seriously I should leave my iPad at home. The one I jumped on came with some artillery and an add on, which pretty much worked out being free.

But enough about my week willed nature, I also managed to get some paint on my Greeks…

Still a fair old bit to do, but definitely getting there… and finally I decided to open the foam clay and add some to the helmet…on the upside, there aren’t any cracks… on the downside it looks like some apprentice welder has been allowed to practice on it…

Once it has dried, I should be able to set upon it with the sander and get the bits smoothed off.

Yep I made a start on the next batch this evening… not much to say really….

Oh there are some more baggage carriers too, with their adopted mule, that I have had for about 20 years. I stole one of the minis to go with the cart, the mule filled his space on the base… here is the cart and funky nude musicians.