Well that is three things printed and the fourth on the plate now…
Two 38T’s and a 222 Armoured car.
I am printing a mkIIf right now.
Hopefully it will keep limping on until replacement parts come.
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
More Tanks… or Technically ‘More Tank’
The printer has been chugging away for three hours and four minutes this evening producing the first of the Stug III.
I am not sure what happened, but the barrel has had a bit of a wobble and has a melted lump near the middle. It seems solid enough though.
As can be seen from the photo above, I decided to give the statues a coat of dark grey. Once this layer is dry I will dry brush up through lighter shades of grey.
I didn’t get much more done as I have caught a lurgey from the kids in school. My voice has gone and I am alternating between coughing my guts up and sneezing. All in all feeling sorry for myself.
So to cheer me up please direct me to a picture of the back end of a Stug as I am not sure what is support that needs removing and what is AFV that needs to stay.
Tomorrow I will print off more AFV’s
More Tanks…Update
Hurrah, the laptop is back and tonight has been spent slicing tanks.
Somewhere I have a set of pre sliced tanks but I cannot find them…
Sliced up and ready for printing are the following:
MkIII with a long 50mm
38T
MKII
Early Stug with and without schurtzen
I still need to slice a MkIV
I also sliced a Churchill… sadly it is a MKIII, I couldn’t find a MK1… well I could, but it was 1/72 instead of 1/100. I decided against the A10 etc as who in their right mind would want to play with one.
Just for fun, I also sliced a kubelwagen, an Austin 10 staff car and an Austin 7 Tilly. The latter is printing now.
So the allied force looks like this…
This will be split into two equal sets, one for me and one for the prize. I will print either two or four Churchill’s (I haven’t decided yet – they take over three hours each to print).
As for the Axis so far:
Yeah the Tiger would splat the allied tanks on its own, but it is for me. I might do a me against all comers with a Tiger, which might be fun…
The Panther is obviously in the wrong timeframe, but so far two MkIII’s a MkIV and two 38T’s (the MKII is a bit confused as I have a track from a C and a D on it… at least you can’t see both sides at the same time.
The buildings are mostly glued together too.
I have another half dozen that need roofs. I will have to get them printed off too. The scale is off with them, the seem more 1/72 than 1/100. In hindsight I should have reduced the size a bit more, but too late now.
The Tilly has just finished printing and here she is…
I will see what other non tracked vehicles are available, I really want a 222 as they are my all time favourite AFV.
Right I can go to bed now that the print has finished. It took a total of 1 hour 24 minutes to complete.
More Tanks… Again….
So today involved some more tanks and giving them a spray of white undercoat so that I can use the airbrush to get some colour on. So I now have six Matilda, three Char B and four Somua (technically I have four and a bit Char B, but I need to print another turret before it is finished).
Things took slightly longer as the Somua in the middle had a bit of an accident. As I was stripping away the support I managed to pull both tracks off as well as the back off the turret. This is probably due to damp getting into the PLA causing it not to stick as well. I just need to find out what colours I have and what colours I need before I can get these painted.
I also ended up listening to this…
I remember doing a lot of Vietnam wargaming, primarily with Esci 20mm plastics and using Bodycount rules.
I then bought some 1/200 scale kit at a convention then kind of went off it again until, funnily enough, joining the Shetland club. I ran an RPG based on an Alpha team in the highlands of Vietnam. We had a hoot. Five players… a four man Alpha team and a Kit Carson scout. As all of my stuff had gone, I went for cardboard troops and flats for vehicles.
I still have the card figures…
Hopefully my good lady will bring the laptop back with her soon so that I can start on some more Germans. The other thing I will need to print are some more roofs for the buildings. Hopefully I have some suitable desert colours for the allies.
Tanks…and yet More Tanks
So nothing painted today, but a few more tanks printed…
So here we have six Matilda, three Somua, three Char B, a Honey, a whippet and a very outnumbered MKII. I am part way through printing another Char. I have got some more early British cruiser tanks ready to go, but for that I need the laptop as they are stored on it’s hard drive.
These are destined for Games day next month. I still need to print some more honeys and some more whippets (possibly) then go daft printing more German tanks.
Each tank is taking about an hour and a half to an hour and forty five to print. Not the fastest thing to get on the bed, but to be honest some of the stuff I have printed took ten hours so by comparison these are speedy.
The buildings are already done and have been for months… April to be exact…
https://bogenwaldblog.wordpress.com/2019/04/08/desert-house-5-update/
Evidently way back in March was the last time I printed any tanks.
https://bogenwaldblog.wordpress.com/2019/03/11/printing-tanks-ii/
The rules I will be using are ‘What a Tanker’
I decided on these thanks to Mark in the States who ran some games at various conventions and his local club I think too. He must be very persuasive on his blog as I have Sharp Practice and couldn’t get on with it at all.
I purchased them and liked their simplicity…As Mark pointed out… very easy rules for a participation game.
My plan is to basically print and paint two forces, plus a couple of small villages. One shall be for the Games day and the other is as a give away. Shetland is trying to get our own MRI scanner so my plan is that if people make a donation to the cause then they get a raffle ticket to win the second set. I will have to check all of the ins and outs of this. I was going to contact the guys to see if They would donate another second set of rules to go with the tanks and terrain. I think I have probably run out of time now…
I would have printed out some German tanks, but sadly my good lady had wandered off with the laptop and forgot to bring it back.
So tomorrow, if the laptop returns then I will print out a whole pile more tanks from both sides. I might print out some armoured cars, just fir the hell of it. My favourite being the German 222. Not sure why but it is most certainly my favourite armoured car.
We shall see how many tanks (if any) I get done tomorrow…
Random Stuff…Lizardmen
Not much done tonight… I am somewhat fatigued… didn’t get in until 19.00 so quite a long day…
Anyway tonight I worked on and pretty much finished the larger blue Lizardmen. The Leviadon blue is a bit dark so I did some dry brushing to lighten them up a bit (not that you can really see in the photo). The shoulder guards are actually bone coloured, but look metallic in this photo.
Tomorrow I will do the last two bases of the grey lizards. This weekend I am going to have to get going on desert war tanks as it is only a month (probably less) to the Games day and I still have loads to print and paint, not to mention building terrain etc.
The Orca were back round Shetland today, some amazing footage here…please be warned it does involve another seal hunt …https://www.shetnews.co.uk/2019/09/19/watch-as-seal-captured-on-video-being-flipped-into-air-by-orca/
Conquistadors…day 3
I managed a teeny bit of painting today, as well as trimming down the spear points. To be honest they are two big, but at least they can be seen 😂
I also managed to print off some 30 x 40 bases. A couple have a corner raised, this is due to a draft or difference in temperature on the print bed. I decided to print them off rather than purchase any more (well at least for a while).
I also managed to merge a couple of Lizardmen with a 40 x 30 base. There were five different lizards so I have come up with three different bases worth, each lizard base took and hour and twenty minutes to do.
Aztecs… Feathers and Statues
I managed a bit more tonight, mainly painted all of the feathers I could find. I went for yellow and after finished painting them I realised that most of the feathers in Codex Mendosa were green!
I will get the ends painted different colours, Black for the peasants and brighter colours for the rest.
I also printed off the final statue,
This is as it came off the print bed. The raft really does work, and you can see the built in support fir the elbows. I will get it sprayed tomorrow.
I want the Aztecs finished tomorrow if at all possible. We shall have to see how I get on!
Bogenwald 