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.

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

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.

A Smidge on the Samurai

Tonight I managed to slap some paint on the samurai.

As I had been mooching about for the missing cavalry I did come across some of the Irregular individual miniatures. They aren’t too bad compared to the Baccus ones. It’s a real pity that the 2D6 ones are so tiny, they are really nice miniatures but don’t really compare to the others.

Today I got a parcel all the way from China… it was full of paint brushes, well around twenty of them. Now I honestly cannot remember ordering any brushes, apart from the ones from Wish about a year and a half ago. This leaves two options, first and most likely… I am a pillock and have a memory like a sieve, second is that I have received a random package of paint brushes from China.

On a totally different note, the printer seems to be hanging in there. The pole arms came out absolutely fine, so this evening I am printing a couple of ram cavalry… I am going for two at a time 🤞. Hopefully by tomorrow I should have four of them in total.

Well one day to go and the cough has started as well as the sniffles. Not a happy Bunny!

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.

It is Alive!!!

Alive I tell you, Alive!!!

Okay maybe a bit melodramatic (or a lot), but this evening I have printed a dozen crossbowmen in two lots of six and three pole arms that wouldn’t print at all….

I deliberately spaced things out in case the extra suction in the FEP was causing problems. I have attempted the pole arms three times before this and they failed each time. This time I just put them on their own on the build plate and voila they came out fine. I have changed nothing else. All settings are the same. Right now I am trying a dwarf mounted on a ram… not like in the hobbit thankfully, but a fully armoured one. We shall see how it copes. Hopefully everything is spaced out enough for a successful print.

I got nothing painted as I have spent all evening looking for some missing 6mm Samurai cavalry. When I checked the Baccus shop it stated the army I bought should have had two units of 15 strips. I can only find one. On the up side I did find the Daimyo base with all of the necessary figures still blue tacked on.

Silly season is upon us once again… 23.56 and I can still see up the valley…this was the view at 23.30…

The iPad camera was struggling a bit

It is now going to get a bit darker every evening 🥴

More on the Cavalry

Tonight I wrangled with the printer a bit again and got further than yesterday. One type of halberd isn’t working so I am going to redo the slicing of it to see if that helps. It seems to be failing at the lowest point so there is something wrong with the supports… anyway enough of printers. I got a bit more done on the cavalry…

I went hunting for another pack and then realised that this was actually it… it will do as Samurai Armies didn’t have huge cavalry forces. I toyed with the idea of a different colour for the cavalry, but decided against it. Therefore we have 15 minis in each colour. In case you were wondering I painted the horses in threes, then did the armour colour. I suddenly realised that one colour would have three black horses, so I changed one to the opposite colour to allow a bit of horse variation in both forces.

I also managed to get the archers done…

Now if I remember correctly then there are two packs of yari armed troops and one of teppo. These will need to be added to the sticks and then sprayed white, but I am pretty much half way to doing the whole army.

Tomorrow I hope to get some more done on these.

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.

Starting on the Samurai Cavalry

Tonight I made a start on the cavalry…

The archers just need the flesh doing and then they are done, apart from the bases…

I will hopefully get some more done on these tomorrow night. I am interviewing tomorrow, so wish me luck. I need the right person for this job.

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.