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3D printing and Greenstuff

As suspected the top of the head armour has completely come adrift…

I swore!

So I got the two bits superglued together and then added some Greenstuff to the gaps on both the armour and the throne.

Interestingly, as I guessed the cracks are at exactly the same height…

Can you guess where the fault lines were?

Once this lot has cured, I will get some more added… especially to the bottom… guess which pillock snapped it off when removing the supports!

Whoops!

The body for the mega-Beasty is going to take 22 hours to print. For this reason I want to make sure that the above doesn’t happen mid print. If I get time this week I will relieved the bed and also check the nozzle and filament to make sure there is no problem there. I can also increase the spring tension on the extruder to ensure the cogs are biting into the filament properly as they feed it through the Bowden tube to the nozzle.

If it weren’t for the cracks I am really pleased with the prints

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Off the Printer

So, as I said yesterday, I had been printing something terrain wise for my Seraphon Force. Here it is…

Seven hours forty three minutes to print…

I plonked a couple of Saurus next to it to give you a size of scale.

Not everything is perfect though… it has bloody big gaps in it. Now these can be filled etc, but it does mean that there is a problem with the printer. Probably some sort of under extrusion or for some reason the layers aren’t bonding together properly. The latter might be caused by damp in the filament. The roll has been on there for a good while, and as the heating packed in in the shed it has not been the best conditions.

I also started on the dread Saurian. This is a Seraphon Mega Beasty. Now I don’t have the dosh to buy one, so I thought I would print it.

This thing is …king huge! I actually dropped the size down to 70% as the body wouldn’t fit on the build plate. As you can see, even scaled down it is a bit on the large side…The head alone is bigger than the large scale Saurus hero.

A mere four and a half hours to print this!

Now the problem I have is that I don’t want to try printing the body until the printer problem is sorted.

The Mega-Beasty comes in four parts. Head, torso, tail and finally head decoration. I am printing the latter right now and I think, just by looking at it, that there are going to be problems. It is splitting apart in places, funnily enough at roughly the same height as the throne and head.

As a total aside, I am still having the panic episodes which quite frankly are doing my head in. I have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow so hopefully he can help out. On the up side of all of this, I am noticing the warning signs a lot more, the panic attacks at present might be due to me fighting back.

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New Things

Today new things arrived and new things were purchased.

As part of the family is still self isolating . My eldest and I managed to escape into town to get horse feed and a new gas bottle. As the schools are off for a week we also had a hunt for some kind of board game that they would all want.

We did manage to find some games as well as some more Contrast paint 😉

I went for Revell plastic glue as it was half the price of the GW stuff!

The other thing, was a postal delivery. A box of bits for Muskets and Tomahawks.

I ended up getting the cards and tokens. I didn’t bother when I went for the pre-order so once the rules came I realised that there weren’t any cards that I could have copied so I decided to order them.

Hopefully I will get a game or two in soon. Due to the Covid virus there is no archery tomorrow. I will give the club a miss too.

This made me laugh far too much!

Instead of painting anything, I spent the time slicing various lizardy things. I can’t be bothered to wait another couple of hours to show you. Instead I shall go to bed, and show you tomorrow.

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Orks…Almost There

Didn’t get in until 7.30 tonight so by time dinner occurred I was too knackered to do much, but at least I got a bit more done.

It is really just the metalwork and tidying up a bit to go, then onto the Riders of Rohan.

A bit of excitement occurred today, apart from my wife and the two youngest being unwell with cold/flu symptoms.

The Authority has decided to close all schools for the whole of next week (apart from three on the outer islands). They emailed at 13.05 stating that staff needed to be told by 13.15 and parents by 13.30. I was already back teaching by then and just happened to check my emails. Otherwise we would have found out after the kids went home. They phoned to say had I received the email two minutes before 13.30.

This closure is not for health reasons, but because we have very little supply cover for the schools and we have lost a lot of staff and kids who are self isolating (or in the case of a lot of the kids, been removed from school by anxious parents).

As of yesterday Greater Glasgow and Clyde had fourteen cases of the virus and our little island of 22,000 had six. We had the dubious honour of being third. As of this morning we almost doubled that figure to eleven.

Now you may think this closure is a bonus, sadly not. All staff are expected to attend their place of work. No extra painting time for me.

Hopefully I will get the orks and Rohirrim finished this weekend.

Until tomorrow…seeya. I will end with a nice picture overlooking South Whiteness

I reckon it is going to be frosty tomorrow morning!
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Orks and the Trike

My daughter started on her Dino this evening…

Whilst she was getting on with her painting I managed to get something done on my orks.

Hopefully this weekend she will get her dinosaur done and I can carry on with these.

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A White Triceratops

So I a achieved nothing this evening… had to pick my daughter up from Youth Theatre and then had to try and untangle the work from today so that I could plan for tomorrow.

So with one thing and another the best I managed was the spray this chap for my daughter who wanted to paint a big dinosaur to match in with mine. Once again it has some really nice detailing on it. This is not an expensive Scheich one, but a cheap Chinese one with a date stamp of 1991. It does have some mould lines, which I forgot to remove. She may have words with me!

A thought has just struck me… were there albino dinosaurs? Or is albinism a relatively new thing? We will never know, but it is an interesting thought nonetheless.

The other bit of excitement from today was that my son was sent home from school with a very high temperature and a cough. So a lot of phoning to doctors etc. He is looking a lot better tonight. We think it is just a cold/cough. The other amazing thing is that the next two fire festivals have been cancelled. The South Mainland One is second only to Lerwick so for that to be cancelled and not just postponed is quite a big thing. So well done to them for following advice from the NHS. Two people who were on a birthday bus that visited most of the hostelry’s on Shetland have tested positive for the virus… whoops!

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There Might Have been a Leak!

So today I went into the bottom of the big shed looking for something. When I moved a box of some 6mm stuff it sloshed… not the normal sound one would associate with 6mm miniatures in cardboard boxes.

Fantasy miniatures with what looks like mist forming in the corner!

All in all it looks like I am going to have to rescue some miniatures shortly… I really don’t know how I am going to store these now. I have had the rosin boxes for around 30 years 😂.

The word ‘Bugger’ springs to mind! Not a great dice roll either!

It’s getting on a bit now so I think I will get this lot sorted and paint something tomorrow evening.

An update…. they are all out of the besogged boxes and sitting there attempting to dry.

I found some more after the above was taken. The dwarves have joined them on the drying plank. These are pretty much all fantasy apart from the pile on the right. I now know where my WW1 Turks ended up! I never did finish them. I reckon I should sometime as I must have had these 30 years or so. From having a quick look I think they are all Irregular Miniatures.

I evidently had two phases of painting when I did 6mm…

The taking the time approach!

The above was evidently when I took my time. The other option was when I just threw some paint on and called them done! As I have a few unpainted Fantasy armies , I am now wondering how Contrast would work???

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Back to Middle Earth

As I have ordered the Seraphon battle tome, I thought I would hold on painting the actual lizards until I see what the different types are. Evidently different ones have different colours.

For that reason I decided to haul the Riders of Rohan and Warg riders out and get back on with them.

There are loads of other bits and pieces that I can work on until I decide upon a colour scheme.

On a totally different note, we now have two confirmed cases of Covid 19 on Shetland. https://www.shetnews.co.uk/2020/03/09/coronavirus-cases-confirmed/ .

So we will have to see what happens next. My daughter says that one of her teachers and his son in the high school are self isolating. A clinic has been set up in the Gilbert Bain hospital. I went to the doctors today and the first thing they asked was had I been abroad in the last 14 days.

The weird thing is that the couple and their nursery aged child were in Italy together. He has come home and has infected a co-worker, whilst his family are fine. It is quite funny that a number of people that I spoke to were convinced that as we were an island that somehow we were immune. They seemed to forget that we have an airport and daily ferry run to the mainland.

Hopefully tomorrow I will get some of the white covered up on these miniatures. Until then – seeya…

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Big Beasty Comparison

I am really knackered tonight so decided not to pick up a paintbrush.

I got both big beasties out and had a look at them. Looks wise, and not painting or colours, I actually prefer the Sleich one.

Now I know that one is meant to be an accurate representation of an Allosaurus and the other is a made up dinosaur thingy, but I actually like the smaller one more.

This will sound daft, but it looks more realistic! I think I must be going back to the old GW Lizardmen where the cold ones looked like Deinonychus or some other raptoresque beast. The heroes rode things that actually looked like a big bloody dinosaur that you could recognise. Evidently the dark elves are now riding drakespawn they look much better than the Seraphon cold ones.

I do fancy getting some stegadon…. problem is I like the old style that sort of looked like a Triceratops. The pictures below came from the Warhammer Wiki.

I reckon I am just picky! Anyway I have pre-ordered the battle tome. I am glad I didn’t get one when I ordered the box of miniatures as I would have been totally peeved to find I bought the ‘old one’ a couple of months before the new one. The other thing that is on the horizon is a start collecting box of skinks and skinky things. It has a skink priest, a Bastilladon with a big weapon on it’s back. Three terradon riders with big rocks to drop on the enemy from above and a unit of skinks. Now I was going to buy some skinks and at £22 a box they were doable. The start collecting box is £45 (with a 20% reduction) so it is well worth it.

I am going to wait until the book comes before I go for the next box. I have watched a couple of videos on YouTube where the book has been criticised and others where they like it… so I am none the wiser!

I enjoyed archery today. We were given sights today and it took me about an hour to get used to them. For the first time ever I wasn’t even hitting the target. I managed to drop low and to actually go right over the top. Once I got the hang of it I started to group the arrows better. On my last shot I managed to get them all within the size of a saucer. Three were actually touching. The problem is, I don’t know whether I was actually using the sight or using it to compensate for where I wanted the arrow to go. I reckon I will need to try again next week. Next week my eldest and I are going to try on the 18m distance. I reckon I will find out how the sight works then. Both of the girls are still enjoying it. My eldest isn’t too sure about the sight, but my youngest is enjoying using it.

Not sure what I will get done tomorrow, so until then – Seeya.

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Big Beasty with Added Colour

Tonight I managed to get a bit more done on the dinosaur.

Still a few bits to do on it, but it is definitely closer to finishing than a few days ago. I have archery tomorrow morning and then have work stuff to do in the afternoon.

I am still feeling anxious and stressed about work. Probably not something that I should put out there but there is a stigma in blokes saying what they feel. I firmly believe that if more people talk about how they feel then it will help others feel that they can too.

Hopefully I will get the painting finished tomorrow. I can then make a start on either the saddle and rider or on the cavalry riders.

Until tomorrow…seeya