Well as with most things, the best laid plans etc… I was going to do so much this evening and achieved none of it… I did however work for about five hours writing reports. I managed to get nowhere with the caravan wheel, the nut holding the brake drum on would not budge.

Anyway enough whining… we may all have seen this photo of the Normandy Landings…

Interestingly enough, the gentleman in the foreground is one Jimmy Leask a sapper in the Royal Engineer’s and was from Shetland. As I have said before I had the honour and privilege of interviewing a number of The gentlemen who were there 76 years ago today.

Yes, absolutely nothing paint wise was achieved this evening. I sat in the bath, ate tea, prior to this I washed my horse, sadly I don’t have a big pond to throw him in, so it was a bucket, a hosepipe and a pair of rubber gloves. His tail was a bit of a mess so we did that first… I will let your imagination run as to why it was a mess, I luckily didn’t take any photos… but the following image is a pretty good example of the colour of the water in the bucket after the first wash!

Things did get gradually cleaner, after about the fifth bucketful. Sadly my trainers filled up with the overspill…so it was a squelchy drive home… come to think of it he flicked his tail while I was talking… it really didn’t taste beefy at all!

So here he is looking clean…

Hopefully I will get the Arbites based tomorrow evening. I am now on the lookout for a space trucker STL for my mates character.

Tomorrow I think I will start on this lot…

But to be honest, before that I have to get the wheel and drum off the caravan to see what the problem is with that as well as write a pile of school reports. I did some quasi shortlisting for my teacher’s job, I am working with another head teacher on Monday to do it together, but as there are four applicants and they all seem to meet the requirements then I might just interview them all. Last time we tried to get someone we had absolutely no interest.

Until tomorrow… I was going to add something else here, but am buggered if I can remember what it was.

Gaming has restarted… huzzah! We decided to give the Aliens RPG a go.

So my eldest asked for it not to be too shooty, so waves of xenomorphs are a definite no, no. So after a bit of head scratching we started off On a space ship that had a ‘containment’ breach… after a bit of panicking, they managed to make it to the escape pods seconds before the ship exploded… they then hurtled towards a water planet, the retro rockets and parachutes failed to deploy so they came down hard, cracking a few seals… with the water flooding in they fought to open the door before they sank. Luckily with a bit of hurried searching they got some survival equipment and managed to deploy the life raft before the pod sank. I couldn’t think where I got the idea from and then it struck me….

Well I think these are just about done apart from the basing (and all of the bits I missed).

I still think I need to do something with the shields… I might mask off the miniature and spray the thing again. That way I will get a flat finish…. but here they are waiting to be based…

Still feeling ropey so taken some Samurai Wargames Rules and some Bombay Mix to bed.

The Barbecue went well this evening… but I started feeling a bit rough again once my friends went… so early night it is and we will see what tomorrow brings.

This did make me laugh….

I deliberately had a night off tonight, I am tired and thought sod it, I will start downloading all the things I have got on Patreon and Kickstarter…errrr there is rather a lot… things would have gone quicker if I hadn’t downloaded 4 GB of things I had already downloaded.

I managed to get the bits of the coach put together….

I am busy printing the horses now… as things seem to be working I am doing all four at once… wish my luck. The temperature is dropping so hopefully it won’t affect things too much. These are the longest print I will be doing so far..over six hours due to the fact that they are basically stood on their tails, raising their height, and in doing so the print time… I also slowed down the lift speed and made it higher, supposedly it helps.

I also had a mooch at the Aliens RPG… I thought I should as I am running a game on Friday, it will mostly be character creation, but some sort of game introductory session will be required 😉.

So today’s annoying adventures revolves around wheels… or lack of them. I set the old printer away expecting to see two sets of two wheels, instead I got one large and one small. Both of these were at the front of the build plate, so I strained the resin and redid them… I once again got two wheels, and I know what you are thinking.. two large, two small…what is his problem…Sadly the printer decided to mess with my head by printing two wheels on the right of the build plate… AKA… two large wheels! So I now have three large wheels and one small wheel! You seriously couldn’t make this up!!!

Anyway the coach is slowly getting there….

I also did some work on the 15mm samurai and villagers…

It was a bit of a damp evening when I went to lock up the hens, but it did have it‘s advantages…Calm and relaxing evening .

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.