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.
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.
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…
Another day of testing the printer… As I said I would I bumped up the cure time to 9 seconds. and it does look a bit better. The problem is that I printed different miniatures to last time.
So from left to right we have:
Male villager
Town Guard
Female villager
Lounging bloke
Female villager
Lady of ill repute.
I found the reason for my layer shift today… a simple case of user error. If you look at the photo below… you will just about see a nut above the Anycubic logo. The twice I have forgotten to tighten it fully then I got a shift.
You can really see it with the two koi below…
So note to self, I will need to ensure that the nut is tightened. It doesn’t matter really with these supportless miniatures, but when I move onto supports then a layer shift can cause a right pain I would imagine.
One other thing of note with these is that these bases are an absolute sod to get off the plate. For the next lot I am going to put a little gap under the edge of the base to allow a blade to fit in easily.
Today I spent a good while adding bases to miniatures in 3D builder. I found the bases on Thingiverse, but sadly forgot to note down the designers name, I just went and found them as credit, where credit due…
So I ended up adding eighteen I’ll Gotten Games miniatures onto the Ecaroth bases and these are the first half dozen.
So here we have:
Fishmonger
Alchemist
Jailer
Blacksmith
Courtier
Farmer
These six took 2hours 48 minutes to print. Now personally I think I should have cleaned them a bit more, but let’s say 3 hours tops plus curing time.
Now with these I dropped the layer curing time from 8 seconds to seven to see if it was over exposing. Next lot I will bump up to 9 seconds and see if there is a difference (the first lot were done on stock settings of 8 seconds per 0.5 layers.
I would have done some more today, but my eldest snaffle the laptop for her Zoom singing thing, so I will resolve at 9 seconds tomorrow.
In terms of resin usage, they came in at around 30 grams, so hardly anything at all. I checked the resin and actually I bought plant based, which was what I was originally going to get. This states it can be washed in soapy water.
Tomorrow I will carry on with my first steps…. someday I am going to have to add supports 😱.
Today has been a busy one, but I managed to get some painting done as well as working with resin with the kids.
I got the undead a bit further forward as well as finishing the ogres and the cart and draft oxen (I just need to find the wagons now).
I also found my 6mm Arabs from WW1. They are painted so I just need to do the Turks and I am laughing 😉.
The kids made some more resin pieces, but I also bit the bullet and got a start on unboxing the printer…
Guess what is in here?Levelling with paper… I can do that.
To level it you place a piece of paper on the base, and click a button. The printer plate moves down and when it is right down one simply tightens the four silver bolts d voila… press another button to tell it that it is zeroed in and that’s it… ready to print.
All it together and ready to go… I put the square against it so you can see the rough size of it.
I had to print the test cube as I actually couldn’t work out how to slice the bits I wanted to print. Sadly you will have to wait until tomorrow before seeing what it looks like. I am pretty impressed so far as I could never have done it on the Ender3.
Like the Ender it tells me the print time and the amount of material used. I evidently put way too much resin in the holder. Luckily I can reuse the stuff that doesn’t cure. I can run it through a fine sieve and then put it back into the bottle.
This is the start of a very large learning curve as this thing can make hollow prints to save on resin, these hollow prints need plug holes adding to allow the interior liquid resin to escape.
Now I bought grey resin as it seemed a good idea at the time, however having done a bit more research (aka watching YouTube) it is suggested that clear resins might be better as it allows the UV light to pass through the object and cure it faster.
I have got myself a couple of pots, one with ISO in and the other with meths. Again watching YouTube people who can’t get ISO easily were using meths to clean the prints before curing. Tomorrow I will print a couple of Milk maids off and give each a go in the different liquids. I have seen some people use hot water too, so perhaps that will be a third one to test.
Print comes off the plate in 20 minutes or so, so wish me luck!
For some reason the terrain bits have warped, the only thing I can think of is that they got too hot on the window sill, when I was trying to dry off the resin. It might be the case that it was the resin, but it had pretty much been cured for days and they stayed flat… I will try warming them up again and flattening them out…
So today I set up the village and shrine with a few miniatures too.
I am really pleased with how everything came out. I was going to flock the edges of the pond, but decided against it. I may have a rethink tomorrow and do it anyway 😊
Another view of the same scene!
So that is everything done, including varnishes too. The only thing missing is the rice cart…
I also managed to get some more done on the 6mm lizards…
They aren’t looking too exciting at the minute and I think I may have done the crossbows a bit too dark, but we shall see tomorrow.
So today I decided that I needed to get some water into the ponds and paddy fields and here is the result…
I added clear to the ponds then put a couple of drops of sepia ink into the paddy fields. This is the first time I think I have used a two part resin. I have used other stuff years ago… so absolutely no idea what his will end up like.
I also got all the miniatures and buildings coated in a couple of layers of Matt varnish. The shrine and fences have been coated too.
Hopefully by tomorrow I will know whether the resin pour worked 🤞
If it has I will get these flocked up to go with the miniatures. Soon I will be moving onto these.
Bogenwald 