Today was another rotten day, wind up to 60mph and snow. You would imagine on Shetland that we would be used to it, but in fact it is a bit unusual, we will have one or the other, but not normally both. After yesterday’s bus incident, it was nearly a case of me joining them. We were running a bit low on feed for the horses so I braved the elements to get it, actually going into town wasn’t too bad, coming back was a nightmare. I was pooling along at 30mph like a good boy and came up to a long drift, as soon as my wheels hit it the wind caught the car on the side and caused it to shimmy, meaning the back end decided that it wanted to go first. Luckily there was nothing coming the other way so I managed to go wide and come back onto my side of the road. No harm done, but I did need to change my underwear when I got back.

It certainly isn’t a good day to be a sailor off Shetland too…

So when I came back we had a power cut for a couple of hours, my family were lovely and rushed to warn me that the printer would not be working. I got some bits and pieces sliced. I would not however want to be the man up the telegraph pole trying to get the power back on in 60mph winds, so Kudos to them.

It was so cold that I couldn’t even use my squirty foam to sort out gaps in the insulation in the conservatory. I just realised that I could have actually lit the fire in there and warmed up the foam… ahhh hindsight is a great thing!

This evening I did manage to get some painting done, just about finished the cultists as well as the Flamboyant dwarf…

Whilst pa noting these I chose a random Netflix film… ‘The Silence’. I can honestly say it wasn’t much to write home about, and this is coming from someone who will watch pretty much anything. I just got to the point where I thought it was getting to the main part of the film and realised that it had 16 minutes left.

I am feeling a bit under the weather today and have struggled to get motivated to do anything. I did however manage to prize some miniatures off the printer…

85%, 90%, 92% and 100%… I put them next to Percy and as Mikko said, 85% is the one I went with…

As expected the weather turned, 60mph winds and snow. This morning it was 8 degrees, this evening it is – something and feels like -15 because of the wind. This is one of the reasons I think that caused my prints to fail…

The mage is missing an arm and the wardancer is missing a leg. The Paladin second from left is missing a foot, but that was my cock up, luckily I realised and had to hunt though the waste bin to find it! Next to her is a witch hunter.

Once the temperature rises then I will redo the failed two. I also managed to do some crows from my LOTR Patreon…

Hopefully I will feel a bit more motivated tomorrow… an early night should help… and finally, my son has been busy again… tonight’s tipple was butterbeer from the Harry Potter Universe…

Yes it really does. 1.5mm flex shouldn’t be used when 2.5mm is the standard and you cannot mix and match miniatures when they are a different size.

On the electric front, everything now seems to be working fine, thanks for all of the positive vibes yesterday. I did however lose the front plate that has the built in WiFi extender…luckily that is now found, so I will get it fitted tomorrow. We are meant to be getting snow and 50mph winds…oh yipppeee!

I printed off the chappy (I couldn’t be bothered to try and work out how to spell the name of the German mercenary with the big sword) and the mage.. they came out really well…

I decided to put the bloke next to my original RPG Character, Sir Percival Fanhard… He is definitely a tall chap

So this evening I took the same file and scaled it at 80%, 90 and then 95%. I will find out tomorrow if there is a match…

I managed to do a smidge of painting too…

In my first teaching job, I had a lovely deputy head teacher called Anne Standish. She worked with the little ones and used to have a great saying… if it was a crap day she would give it to the queen. So Your Majesty, please accept this day just for you.

So you are no doubt agog to find out why… today I decided to get some more done in The conservatory… I wanted to get the lighting electrics in, before getting the ceiling put on. I had to drop my eldest into Lerwick so picked up the lighting cable I needed. I got home and set about adding the lighting to the mains power … it was then that the swearing started. I realised that my 1.5mm lighting cable was the same size… as… the… 2.5mm cable in situ. Yes.. knob Head hear had put the wrong cable in. Luckily the sockets that were in there had low power devices on them. It did however mean that I had to remove one wall that I put in.

I then realised that I needed 2.5mm cable as I had a full reel of 1.5 mm. The reel of 2.5 was totally gone. So back to Lerwick I went…So my 20 minute job took a lot of the day. I then realised that I had set the printer going and then turned off the power Two and a half hours into a four hour print…. I swore some more!

On the upside, I got some miniatures printed eventually… they had something bizarre going on….

Now this is a first… I think what happened is that I set the cleaner on cure instead of clean. Being inserted in a bath of Isopropyl and then cured probably caused the problems.

Here the three of them are (minus their hands)… they are printing now.

These are really big miniatures. I had hoped I could squeeze them in with some of my GW Mordheim miniatures, but they are too big. My based leader only comes up to their shoulder. I might play around with the scale of them… to put it into context, here is one of them next to my Chaos Marine…

Speaking of Chaos… I made a start on the three I am giving to my mate…

So now that I have my printers up and running again then I thought this Meme was quite appropriate!

Well my printer has just passed its 25th hour straight. Another five and it should be finished. I took a couple of photos, there were going to be four barrels, but two popped off the build plate early on and one of these dropped off right at the end of printing. For some reason the little building which is 40% it’s original size (my goat shed) has warped on one corner…

I also decided to try something a bit more complex this evening and gave a helmet a go… it certainly leaves a lot to be desired, but hey you have to start somewhere.

I need to practice vertical cuts and make sure that I spread the contact adhesive out more evenly, but it is mad of some sheets of EVA that I have had for at least three years, so no harm done. I am still amazed that this came from a flat sheet of foam. The bit on the top is going to be a top ridge with built in nasal guard. I will make cheek pieces and a neck guard too.

On a totally different subject, this is my 601st post in a row. Probably 500 more than there should have been I hear you cry! However, I have had 25000 views and 8018 visitors. Which is pretty awesome. So a big thank you to everyone who pops in to look and leaves a comment too.

Today we decided it was time to do something about the local landmark of our rather knackered caravan.

Well we were going to cut it up last year then the starlings got in and made their nests in it, so we couldn’t, then Lockdown came, then we didn’t have a car to pull the trailer…all in all the winter totally buggered it… well okay buggered it more is a better way to describe it…the last big wind caused this side to completely collapse.

We decided that before the birds nested in it again then we would start to take it down. This proved to be a bigger job time wise than we thought, but with a bit of brute force and ignorance we now have it down to waist height…

I now ache like buggery…part of the reason for this was using the reciprocating saw upside down and back to front as I tried to cut it into manageable bits. Needless to say I haven’t got any painting done this evening. I did manage to get the reprinted cottage of the build plate…

This is a much better size than yesterday’s attempt. I am now printing the larger cottage, with a small animal barn and some barrels… oh and a hen on her nest too.

Tonight I got my brush out and sat down to paint something only to realise that is was 22.00. So I didn’t get that much done. Argentbadger had suggested I leave the flesh tones white, so I had a go at the Contrast white over the base colour of white and it was giving a bit of a shading, but it just didn’t look right. So I added a smidge of flesh tone into the white and added a fair bit of water… this was the effect…

It’s not white, but it is a really light skin tone. So a bit thanks to Argent as I really wasn’t sure what colour to do the faces etc.

I set the FDM printer away this evening and got the cottage printing again, this time at 65% original size. Part of me now thinks it might be a bit small, but I will see in fifteen hours time.

It has been a long two weeks since all the kids came back into school. I am now on Easter break and tomorrow morning I do not want to get up until I wake up… if that is 15.00 then so be it!

It has been a hard couple of days at work and I am knackered. I am two, no three staff down as of today and the fly with a blue bottom is the best way to describe me as of late.

Anyway my daughter got her photos into a exhibition led by creative Scotland, so we watched that over Zoom and then I messed around downloading all of the 3D printer files I haven’t got around to saving yet… this sadly took a long time as there were rather a lot of files to organise.

If truth be told I have too much and will probably never ever print half if it, let alone print it.

Today we were sorting out a new run for the ferrets, it took a little longer than expected but we got there in the end (we hope).

So we have a couple of ferrets that are about six months old now (probably older). Now they come out a fair old bit to play with us, but we felt that it would be good if we could give them a bit more space than in their hutch so we set about building them a play area.

So here are Tonks and Luna, enjoying their new place. Luckily we decided to see what they got up to.

Firstly one of them decided that climbing was their method of escape, so climbed up the concrete wall at the back…

The front of the Knox was 60cm… it is now 80 as she then climbed up the door and then proceeded to shimmy her way out.

The other one is evidently a good jumper… she just about got out of the end using the log in the first photo as a launch pad. We used and angle grinder with a cutting disk in to put a piece of Crain pipe over the edge of the wood to stop her managing to get her claws on the top and haul herself out…

Fully the last time we looked they were still in, unfortunately they decided to both cram themselves in the blue house thing and gave us heart failure as they weren’t anywhere to be seen in the house or the box.

I managed to get the first layer of brown onto the armour… hopefully it is going to work out as well as the other one. Tonight has been video research on using EVA foam.