French Tanks…and a MKIII

Well I managed to get some paint onto the tracks of the French tanks tonight. I gave them a couple of coats of Basilicanum (or whatever it is called) Contrast paint…

I also managed to get the metalwork done on the chains on the back of the Char B’s.

I also managed to print my MkIII too. Yesterday I must have turned the knob as I pressed print and ended up with the LRDG set.

I have bothered photographing as it is a black (printed) MKIII, but it does look rather spiffy, on the allied tank front I was looking for the desert yellow for the French tank and came across this….

I will be able to spray the tanks with this, it might not be totally accurate, but it is better than the desert yellow.

Next thing on the tanks is to paint on the markings and possibly a roundel too….

As the dog had stolen my jam doughnut I thought I would add some Markings to them. I was going to do them in red or blue, but I am now thinking I would leave them in white for the second company with first and second platoon. If I want to be accurate (🤣🤣😂🤣) I will need to change the colour of one of the Char B’s to red or blue as there were only three of them per platoon.

On the car front, we are off to pick up a little runabout tomorrow evening, so by Friday we should have wheels again.

I have checked the piggy bank and I could get a DBA Samurai army from Tin Soldier that wouldn’t break the bank….hmmmm what to do!😱

French Armour…and a troublesome MKIII

Well I didn’t get much painted tonight, in fact I only managed to put a wash on the French tanks.

Although it has dulled them down a bit, I think they look better than they did here…

I would have got more done, but I spent a good while just sitting looking at them trying to work out what was wrong. The front left Somua is the same one in both photos. The wash has certainly clobbered the light colour, but I am relatively happy with the result.

I put a light tone on all of the paintwork, this was ‘watered’ down with medium 50/50 but it was too subtle so I went for 75/25. Once this was dry I then hit the joints with a neat dark tone to give them a bit more depth.

Tomorrow I am going to hit the tracks with basilicanum grey Contrast paint. I am not sure how it is going to pan out straight over the sand colour but we shall see.

The one thing I noticed was that the newly Printed Char B turret is totally different to the rest 😱. To be honest I am just going to leave it as it differentiates it from the other Char B’s.

As for the troublesome MK III….

Here it (or possibly they) is/are…

The more astute of you will instantly be able to count up and realise that a there is more than one thing there and that the troublesome tank is missing it’s tracks.

As to why I now have a Chevy and two SAS jeeps is a bit beyond me. It may be the case that I either inadvertently moved the dial up an item when I clicked print, or possibly added these onto the slicer and forgot to change the name before saving… who knows.

It really isn’t a biggy, as I was going to print these sometime anyway. What I will do is reprint the weapons (apart from the Breda) as they were printed on the side, straight onto the bed. This means that one side is flat and the other 3D.

Tomorrow I will print the MK III (I hope)!

My good lady is still hale and hearty, Thank you everyone for their concern.I have managed to blag a lift tomorrow again and hope I can do so on Thursday and Friday too as it is a bloody long way to walk to work.

More Tanks

Tonight I managed to print a MKIII and a MKII as well as remembering to print the turret of the Char B.

I also managed to get some paint onto the French tanks…

I was going to use the airbrush for these, but in the end thought bollocks and got a brush out.

I looked at my paints and had a quick shufti at some French camouflage and then completely made this up.

Still got a fair bit to do, by fair, I mean loads…

Not sure how much I will get done tomorrow as I am reliant on lifts to get home so who knows what time I will return. I would like one more MKIII printed and then I think I will call it a day. Sadly however I found some SAS/LRDG vehicles which I just had to slice… I will be interested to see how they print. Basically I have done a couple of jeeps, a couple of cut down Chevy plus full sized Chevy too, not to mention a pile of armaments from a Bren, through a Breda and onto a Vickers.

hopefully tomorrow is a less stressful day. A big thank you to everyone for the kind comments.

Sadly my Samurai army will probably have to wait a couple of months, but at least I can ask for it for Christmas, on the other side of the coin, it means I can tackle the lead/plastic mountain and crack on with the shit loads I have part finished or not even started.

Off the top of my head:

Perry’s Hundred Years’ War French Infantry,

15mm FiW minis (cant actually remember what)

Flintloque cavalry, elf currasiers, dog Hussars and Witchlands Light Cavalry, not to mention various infantry sets

Finish my 15mm undead horde

Not to forget a shit load more 10mm stuff from Mongols, through fantasy and into the Sudan.

I really should start selling stuff I am never ever going to use

And actually play with some of the stuff I have painted!

Cars… From bad to Worse

So this happened today…

Luckily my wife wasn’t hurt and it happened at relatively low speed. The car seemed to judder so she went to pull in – it kept going left and then hit a very big ditch. So that is us without any cars for the foreseeable future. This is what can best be described as a total bugger as the nearest bus stop is about 3 miles away and as it is wool week then all of the hire cars are out on hire too. Luckily one of my parents at the school has said he will come and get me tomorrow morning. What a total star that he is. He also does my cleaning and does the school transport so I am totally in his debt.

Churchill

At last it is finished!

Some pillock evidently had it on super fine or something, but this took just under 5 hours to print. It is understandable as the MKIII took just under two hours at its resolution 0.15 I think, the Churchill was 0.1.

The one difference between this and all of the other tanks is that the turret on this one was printed horizontally. All the rest have been printed vertically with the rear on the base plate.

I reckon I will print another one (and only one) of these, but will do it at a lower resolution to speed things up a bit.

Tomorrow I carry on printing, but will also begin painting – I must remember to print the Char B turret first!

I wish I could remember what version of the Churchill this is VII or VIII is ringing a bell.

Anyway so much for an early night! With the power issued on the printer then I didn’t want to leave it running overnight.

More Tanks tomorrow… Char B turret followed by a MKII and then one or two MKIII’s depending on the time.

Axis Tank Update

By Axis please read German, Although it is the desert war, I haven’t got round to printing any Italian tanks yet.

So here we have two MkIII with long barrelled 50’s

Two 38T’s, a MKII and a 222

Two early Stug with short guns and a later Stug with the long barrel.

Already printed are two MkIII, two 38T’s and a MkIV, not to mention a Tiger and a panther. I am hopeful going to manage to do at least another couple of MKIII’s and another MKII. I will try and get some Italian armour for completeness and possibly a couple if Early Marder for open topped tank destroyers.

As you can see, the allied armour has had another spray, this time in white. I decided to redo them as I found a bottle of Iraqi sand paint. This is (in my mind) closer to the allied tank colours from the desert. Once the spray has cured I will get the airbrush out and blast them with the appropriate base colours.

A Churchill is being printed at the moment. Sadly I couldn’t find an early version. Compared to the other things printed this is huge.

Once the Games day is out of the way I will have a blast at Azazel’s Orctober with these.

It is a bit of a mix of metal and plastic LOTR stuff I have lying around.

I also want to buy the 15mm Samurai from Tin Soldier, but all of a sudden I got an email about these:

https://www.alternative-armies.com/collections/kitton

I am so going to have to get some!

Right off to check on the printer then time for more Cold and Flu plus!

Tanks… Off He Goes Again… Maybe

Well the nice people from Creality came back to me again, asking for more photos and advice on what to do next. I unscrewed the power unit from frame and then the plastic cover from the power unit.laid it down and switched on the socket to check the voltage and voila… power to the whole machine.

Hurrah!

Checked all connections and they seemed fine.

Put everything back together again and the power went off again…

Booh!

Fiddled with the wires…power came back on again….

Hurrah….

Started printing something and all of a sudden loss of power again…

Boooh! (I said something like that)

Fiddled with a connector and the power came back on again…

I restarted the print and watched the connector… as soon as it moved, power went off. I therefore got a glass jar and blue tacked the connector to it.

It worked well, right up to the point the tension of the wires popped the blue tack off.

More blue tack later I managed to print a 38T. You can see the extra blue tack in the background.

This one took 2 hours 3 minutes to print…

I am printing another one now to see how it goes. I have contacted Creality again to let them know where things lie now. It looks like either a loose connection or a fractured wire, so I am keeping a close eye on things.

The other thing I managed to do was to spray the Allied tanks… apologies for the purists amongst you, I grabbed my Army Painter Desert Yellow and blasted them with it.

Originally I had only done the French tanks as I reckoned they had ‘interesting’ camouflage patterns and I could get away with it, then I thought bollocks, I only have a couple of weeks to paint them all and I don’t have a British paint colour, so they got a blast too.

I must remember to print off a new turret for the Char B now that things are limping along.

I am going to get the short barrelled Stug III sliced tonight ready for printing tomorrow… not to mention any other Axis tanks I can think of.

Statues…Standing Silently

Well, as I can’t print anything, more on that later, I decided to paint something. The nearest thing to hand were the statues.

I bet you can’t tell which one was done with the lowest resolution 😉. To be honest I could have binned it but decided against it as it is a weathered stone statue. The photo was taken quite closely, but at a metre away the lines don’t really show that much. I will get a green wash around the bottom to show damp. I did consider covering some in creepers etc, but I am not so sure. In the past I have used string, died a shitty brown and soaked in PVA. This is draped over things and left to dry. Once dry ‘leaves’ are added. The problem is it can look either: ok, good or totally crap. Probably why I am not going to bother.

These statues came from Thingiverse for free, but as I have printed a fair bit from Terrain4Print, I decided to help him out through Patreon.

Still coughing my guts up, but thankfully not as much as yesterday.

Regarding the printer, as I said yesterday, I contacted the manufacturer through Amazon, they came back this morning asking for further information through photos or videos. I have sent these back to their technicians and we will have to see what they come back with.

Tomorrow I will probably spray the desert houses and make a start on them this weekend.

in a total change of direction (and doing my bit for Shetland Tourism) the Northern lights are out…

https://www.shetlandwebcams.com/cliff-cam-3/

Picking them up on the Sumburgh cliff cameras

Cough, Cough, Cough!!

I feel the need to shout Unclean loudly and paint a cross on the door, the Nasty cough has come back big time – so instead of trying to paint intricate details on something 15mm tall I decided to shove some paint on something nearer 100mm tall instead.

I threw a lighter grey dry brush on these. It’s a bit heavy to be honest, but I am going up a few lighter shades and then add some colour to the eyes, tongue and associated metalwork.

Car is in the garage, which according to my wife was a hoot. She phoned them up to ask if they could get it in, they said they could most certainly pick it up from where it was parked … then hung up before asking for a name, the registration number or where it was parked. Luckily when the keys were dropped off, they were accompanied by a note giving the necessary info.

Regarding the printer, it is probably the motherboard or something like the cables to the motherboard. I have contacted the manufacturer through Amazon and we shall see where that leads.

It has done really well up to yesterday and I have printed lots of things. I only wish I had done more German tanks earlier on. But as I said yesterday I have got just about enough German stuff to make for a game, or indeed, I could use some of the French tanks as captured equipment. I have got enough buildings to see me into the game and to be honest I can scratch build rooftops with card if necessary to add in any more.

Hills are easy peasy so all systems are go. Just got to paint everything next.

Out of interest, I have just staggered into the lounge and my family are looking like this…

Should I be worried?