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Mercy Sakes Alive

Looks like we got us a convoy… yes some more 6mm loveliness arrived this morning all the way from the USA.

Was the dark of the moon on the sixth of June
In a Kenworth pullin’ logs
Cab-over Pete with a reefer on
And a Jimmy haulin’ hogs
We is headin’ for bear on I-one-oh
‘Bout a mile outta Shaky Town
I says, “Pig Pen, this here’s the Rubber Duck
“And I’m about to put the hammer down”

Yes Convoy is one of my favourite films… I have it on DVD and haul it out to watch every so often… One of the best Theme songs ever…

Back in the Day I had a CB and used to belong to the Citizens Band Radio club in the village where I lived.

Although I love the Convoy Theme… this is a close second 😉

So enough of big rigs and CB Gibberish…. the other thing in my parcel was my Lizardmen cavalry…

These are the lizards riding Pachycephhlosaurus which I thought made a nice change from Utahraptors and the like. I did quite fancy some of the other big dinosaurs, but will have to wait a while for them.

This is the link to the website: https://www.microworldgames.com/ the shipping worked out at $12 which to be fair is about as some companies in the UK want to charge me for parcels to Shetland.

Tonight we got back into our RPG campaign suitably distanced. it was good to get playing again. Nobody died, even though they decided to spend 5 days wandering around the barrow downs… we shall continue with it next week.

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Teeny Tiny Monks and the Village

Today I was working on the monks and I got a phone call from a friend and colleague who moved away and was sitting on his own down country so they didn’t get as far forward as they could have done. But that’s okay, I would rather talk to him than finish these.

A bit of work tomorrow should see them finished, that is if I can move. I was mixing concrete by hand today and I have discovered muscles I never knew I had.

I put the buildings I have together so far…

This is what I aspire to …https://tenkafubu608971038.wordpress.com/2020/07/20/another-watchtower/

This blog is set up for Sengoku Jidai in 6mm so naturally I am following it. Some amazing terrain and minis not to forget some really interesting posts too.

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Resin Experiments

So after printing nearly 40 miniatures, a pile of 6mm buildings and a small ancient fleet I decided to print some test matrixes to help with the dialling in off the printer…

From left to right, top to bottom, we have 8.5 seconds, 9 seconds, 10 seconds and 14 seconds a layer. The 14 seconds is overexposed I think, but I may be totally wrong with that. From what I understand for circles and pegs you need to have the same amount of holes as pegs, for the bars at the bottom, the bars should technically be able to fit inside the slots below them and the two parts of the thing in the middle should just be touching, problem is they all look the same to me apart from the last one! Well I reckon I have until next Monday to ponder this as that is when the next bottle of resin will arrive.

Pete asked an interesting question about cost of resin over filament. There is definitely a difference. Resin cost me £29.00 for 500ml and filament was £25.00 for a one kilogram roll. Before lockdown the rolls were coming in at £18 a go. So there is definitely a price differential in place. However I have printed shit loads of things. Nearly 40 figures as well as my fleet and buildings so cost per thing is below 50p per item. There is a time differential as well. I can print six figures in the amount of time I could print one on the resin printer. Unfortunately the same cannot be said for the Ender. It would take six times as long to print the six miniatures.

I printed these for my eldest, just under 11 hours on the Ender (okay it was high quality)

Height determines the length of time on the Resin Printer.

I will get some of the resin stuff painted ASAP and also shove one onto the Ender and see what the difference is when painted up. A bit of a long journey, but I am enjoying it so far 😉.

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Teeny Tiny Monks

Tonight I Set about getting some paint onto the 6mm monks.

What with the resin printing and not baring able to be bothered then these got put onto the back burner a bit. There is still a long way to go with them, but at least I have made a start. The majority are in saffron robes, but I have thrown some grey and red in there too to add a bit of variety. I also added some Caucasian paint to the bearers at the back as they have now become my peasant bearers for my samurai army. I will probably cut off the armed man at the front and replace them with a samurai or Ashigaru miniature instead.

My Baccus order should be getting cast this week sometime. I am 20 orders beyond the last update so unless there are some massive orders in then I should be getting it next week.

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Further work on the Resin

Ok, first off I think I need to pull back a bit on the resin as tonight I realised that I have pretty much run out, my last print, drained the vat dry, which was not clever. I forgot to check before going out so now I have a pile of house roofs and only one house to put it on. I have, however,got a cunning plan. I will use the broken roof and semi printed buildings to make a burning village… well I think that is what I am up to with it.

The burning buildings will go with these ones…

Resin versus Filament. At this stage I really cannot tell the difference. The one weird thing on the resin is that one of the houses is actually slightly Smaller than the other ones. Another weird thing is that the roofs just about fit. This will be easily sorted as I can print the roof at 51% and the house at 50%. I did manage to print a couple of Tori gates this evening, but sadly the bridge failed, for some reason one end detached from the build plate. In the background you can see the fawn I printed for my daughter as she wants to add it to a diorama.

I put all of the villagers together today… errr there are rather a lot!

No wonder I ran out of resin!

I have ordered a couple more bottles of resin, so nail it comes I am going to be pretty much painting things 😂

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Further Resin Experimentation

Today I did some more miniatures on the Resin Printer. The one thing I have learned is that I am going to have to up my game in the post printing stage. Although I was trying to avoid the ISO, I think I am going to need it to get rid of a lot more of the liquid resin off the miniatures.

I will do some more testing tomorrow with the meths and see if that will work and if not then I will need to get some more ISO in.

In the first picture we have a merchant, lamp lighter, jailer, spearman, sailor and rat catcher. In the second we have a villager and a troll thingy (brain dead and can’t think of the name) and then we have a mix of spearmint and archers with a lone guard and another jailer. The last lot were done at 10 seconds a layer.

Tomorrow I think I will do an individual figure at different time per layer. It will probably be something small (and faster) and really try to get things clean.

Wish me luck!

My eldest wanted to do some sea creatures today but unfortunately, I had a support failure. It was the first time I had tried supports, so that will be the next thing to master after cleaning things.

The one thing that just struck me as I was about to sign off is that I am still printing at the standard resolution for the printer. I haven’t actually tried higher resolution. Something to ponder the future.

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Wearable Dioramas

Today I put my resin fish to good use and made some jewellery.

I had a lot of fish (and a turtle) hence the number of pendants and soon to be pendants..

These were nice and relaxing to do.

Basically a layer of cured resin and then some basing sand, more resin then the fish or whatever with the foliage., more resin then some of the leaves I made ages ago and then topped off with more resin.

My favourite one.

Me doing this caused pretty much the rest of the family to want to do something too. So my youngest is going to do a pond inside a box. My wife and eldest are doing something in a couple of clean jars. So all in all my messing around ended up being a six hour crafting session.

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Something Fishy

Today I painted up some koi, I am going to make something with them tomorrow.

I also found some photos… Pete painted up some Dutch lancers For his Waterloo diorama and Today I found a picture of the Polish Lancers … this was after we adopted one as he was on his own…

I even dressed up as a Cowboy once for a charity event.. took my horse too!
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My Ship had Babies

We today, I decided to try one of each of the different ships, there were in fact ten of them. This time I printed them at 50% size. These will come in handy for Poseidon’s warriors.

The one thing I must get the hang of is to clean things better. Some of these are a bit of a mess. I think it will come with practice and knowing where the resin will lurk. It also didn’t help that two of them stuck together.

I decided to take my safety seriously and decided to wear my mask (that arrived this morning)

Maybe a bit over the top, but it works!

Tomorrow I will get the printer running again at ten seconds a layer. Nine is definitely better than eight so I will do another run of miniatures. I will put the jailer in there again so that I have a consistent figure to test the settings on.

I gave the Ender an airing today and it was an absolute sod. Changed the nozzle and also re levelled the bed, and fave the build plate a damn good clean before it would let me print anything.

I ended up with a small samurai village and an individual house in three bits for my 6mm Forces.

I bought these at the same time as the galleys yesterday. The village comes on a circular base, and there are some individual houses too.luckily the Japanese ones are included. I had to shrink the singles by 50%, and I think they will definitely do. This set also came with a samurai castle.

The sets had various houses from Neolithic right they way up to ACW, so I should have a fair bit to play with. Sadly the individual ones came in at only three sets. Samurai, Tudor and Russian.

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Resin, am I safe to be let out online?

Today I was having a mooch like you do and ended up getting myself some Ancient Greek trireme (or something similar) I also got some 6mm buildings (which evidently aren’t)

But the boats are nice if a little large. I will drop the size down by half I think (if not by more) as I have Poseidon’s warriors rules, it seemed a good idea…

From what I remember there are ten different boats, I printed three off at this size as the vat still had resin in it.

I also set off to print the third set of townsfolk and somehow ended up printing the second lot again.

The printer also had a moment. For some reason when I put the plate back on and it tried to head down at an angle. Luckily it didn’t puncture the FEP film on the vat, but it had a damn good try.

I also had a moment. I was holding my sieve in a pot so merrily poured 300ml of cleaning water into a 100ml pot… needles to say it didn’t fit. Did I pour it in slowly? Did I bugger! Water everywhere! I also learned an important lesson, when you shove uncured miniatures into a water bath with cured resin in and swish it about then the cured resins merrily sticks to the uncured stuff. Hence the need of a water clean as mentioned above.

Tomorrow I will print off the third set of townsfolk and also see what actual size the building are…