Posted on by maenoferren22

In My Grey Phase

I decided to eventually get some paint onto the mausoleum and the Mech.

My son wanted his mech to be grey so who am I to argue. From what I remember he wants the cockpit glass to be blue and the rockets red.

My intention for the mausoleum is to give it a black wash once this grey is dry and then get it dry brushed up to a lighter grey. I keep thinking some kind of metallic colour for the doors but I haven’t quite decided that far ahead.

I really do like it and reckon it will come up a treat once it is finished.

I managed sod all else tonight apart from reducing the bug down to 75% size to see how it looks. It is merrily printing away as I type this. I was going to watch one of the films tonight to get a scale of the things but I couldn’t be arsed to do that.

And it looks this big….

Stick it on it’s very long legs and I think it will look fine… I will print the arms and legs tomorrow and see what I think.

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A Bit of Painting

I threw open my painting box and cracked on with my printed miniatures.

Still a bit to do on some of them but the front two are almost finished. The very pale yellow is going to be a darker yellow. I just wanted to make sure that it would cover ok. I also have a mage in a rather nice purple robe as well as a couple of thieves ready to go. When these ones are done I will get on with the rest of the miniatures for the game.

Sadly as I was working on these my Elves got ignored for another night.

I still can’t get my head around the fact that these all started off as a long string of plastic… a bit of computer magic and voila… miniatures.

I am going to give an arachnid from Starship Troopers a go sometime soon, but for today the printer has stood silent… an unusual thing.

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3D Printing…. A bit of painting.

I decided to start getting some paint onto my miniatures that I have printed.

These are all from Ill Gotten Games. Still a very, very long way to go. I probably would have got further, but I also painted 54 pairs of 10mm elven boots too.

I forgot to show the casualty figures…

These need a bit of work on the top layers. I will have a play around with the slicer settings and see what I can do. The STL files looked fine so it is the slicer that needs the change.

The final bit for this evening are the painted counters…

My initial idea was to paint the numbers a different colour. But as they are very clear anyway I might just save myself a job.

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Neglected Miniatures…Un-neglected

I paused long enough in dismantling and reassembling the printer to get some paint slapped on the elves…

Still a fair old way to go but I am getting there again. I have decided that they are all going to have dark grey cloaks. I was thinking that another mass of differing shades of green on the cloaks would be a bit too much. It also groups them together as a unit.

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3D Printer…Another one of those Days!

Yep, it went all doolally again today! Took it apart to make sure there wasn’t any filament leakage, there was none. I decided to put the new Roll of filament on, so I checked the hot end was still up to scratch.

Tried my fourth attempt to print the count from Ill Gotten Games. To be fair he got up to the waist before pinging off the build plate. Now I learned how to add bases and things to miniatures today thanks to IGG. They have a nice little YouTube video on putting bits together. Even better was the fact that it was free in Windows 10… huzzah.

So after the count disaster I went for some more Sci Fi weapons crates. One if the lads failed totally and the other was a total bugger with filament sploodging where one of the handles should be. I let it finish, dumped the spaghetti and cut the handles off the other lid.

I might actually use my new 3D skills 🤪 to completely remove the handles before printing begins.

Last night I printed this cart…

It is a very nice cart except that a four wheeled cart like this would need a turntable otherwise when it went round a corner it would slide sideways. I intend to make it a two wheeled farm cart. I will also do something about the width of the shafts. I am married to a competition driver so these things are ingrained….

I managed to get all of the tiles finished tonight…

I am going to put a request in to IGG see it they can do a corner for both the road and the river. That way I can increase the length of both…

And finally…. on the print plate are another three town guards. They have been running for three hours 45 minutes and are up to their chest/shoulders. I would like to wait until they finish but I want my bed. I went swimming with the kids an£ what with playing chasing games and getting me to swim with them on my back then I am somewhat fatigued!

I haven’t forgotten my neglected elves, I sprayed them and then errrr neglected them as I started painting tiles 😱. Hopefully I will get on with them tomorrow.

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3D Printer… A Day Of Ups and Downs

The printer was not printing anything this morning, it was being a bit of a bugger last night so after threatening it with violence, I checked the bed level it was way out. Not sure what caused it to change so much but I blame….him….

I am not sure whether he had a snooze on it when it was warm or whether it has been changing incrementally on each print…. the problem with the latter theory is that it was way, way out. Never mind levelling with a piece of paper, this thing could have taken at least a piece of cereal box card. On the up side we got there in the end!

So Today I managed to print off some more sci fi barricades and some more alien plants.

The four barricades came in at 3 hours 30 minutes and the plants at an hour 19 minutes each.

I also got some paint onto the game tiles…

The tiles, especially the building ones still need a lot of work, but I am happy with the other ones and will get them varnished.

I am giving a 4 wheel wagon a go at the minute. This is something that failed yesterday and this morning. Touch wood, but it has got a bit further than it did earlier. I can actually see some wheels and the bodywork forming. This is a two hour print so I might manage to stay up until it finishes.

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Tauriel a Wood Elf from Mirkwood

My daughter’s character is now finished.

I am rather pleased with it and she is really pleased with it.

It has come a long way from the bare white plastic… I spent quite a while on this one, probably longer than I would have with one of my own.

Tomorrow the party have to try and rescue an idiot youth from a wily old troll. This task is made all the more difficult due to the fact that two of them are hobbits!

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3D Printer Updates…

So the printer has been running quite a bit this afternoon and evening…

I redid the heroes for the game… much better this time round… but then again they took 5 hours plus to print. I still managed to snap the spear off the same one again! I reckon the PLA just isn’t strong enough. I will drill it out and put in a wire spear or something similar.

This is still without the specific miniature profile for the slicer.

The other thing I made was a vat of bubbling something or other.

It isn’t exactly the largest thing to hide behind, but I reckon I could double the size. This size took an hour and a half to print.

I also made a start on printing the game tiles….

Still a very long way to go. I fished my Dark green rattle can out of my shed and have brought it into the house to warm up a bit. I will give all the fields etc a spray with it then get some variation onto them. Part of me wonders about adding flock to them, but I am worried it might look weird. On the upside I can print a tile off and give it a go…..

On the plate now are some 40k style ammo boxes with separate lids… They should be done in not much over an hour.

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3D Printing… Undercoat

Well tonight I shoved a base coat of grey onto all the miniatures I had in the kitchen with me and I must say I am really pleased with the results (the miniatures that is and not my ability to slap grey paint onto plastic models).

It really has shown how good they look. The black shiny plastic didn’t make it easy to see the details. I would argue that from this picture you can’t really tell that I printed them at home. If you look closely you can see extrusion issues

This can probably be sorted, it might be over or under extrusion. The extruder might need calibrating or alternatively I could have filed it off! At this distance the printer lines are a lot more visible but as it cost nowt apart from about 7 pence worth of PLA and time on the printer. In fact all of the figures above cost just over 75 pence worth of PLA. I have worked it out thus…. 1 kilogram of PLA cost me £18.00 . Therefore 1 gram costs 0.018p…. I think my maths is sound there… multiply that by the 42 grams for the weight of all of the figures… giving a total of… 0.756 or in other words just over 75p

Somebody please correct me if my maths is wrong! 😱

The printer is merrily printing of a night fiend… something I had forgotten to print for the game. As an experiment I am printing him extra fine.

Tomorrow I am going to have a bash at some Necromunda esque barricades and Alien plants. My first roll of PLA is running down so I don’t want to print anything large until the new roll goes on. As it stands I haven’t really sussed out how far ‘not much’ will go 🤔

Posted on by maenoferren22 · 6 Comments

Wood Elf

My daughter has joined our gaming group and is playing a wood elf character in our One Ring campaign. Being a kind father that I am I purchased a miniature for her and am now painting it.

Still a very long way to go, but I am getting there slowly.

We did have a lot of fun on Hero Forge making up characters but at $10 for the download and $20 for a physical version we went for the cheaper option of £3.25 for a reaper bones mini.