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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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 🤔
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.
Well tonight I printed up a couple of the game tiles from the curse of Moht game by Dutchmogul.
These even though very flat took 3 hours to print. I think it is probably caused by all of the tufts and individual cobblestones on the road.
I also painted up one of the characters from the game. He is nothing spectacular but does the job. In terms of detail think early Games Workshop plastics…to be fair I printed him with standard settings on the printer. I reckon I could get more detail if I tried.
The other think I printed was a leaking barrel. Not sure what it is leaking but I thought green was rather funky.
As for the game tiles I need 14 in total:
1 keep
1 hill
1 river
1 ruin
4 fields
2 forests (being printed now)
2 roads (printed)
2 villages.
There are the miniatures too.
4 cultists
4 dread fiend monster thingies
1 cleric
1 manflayer (printed… I think)
1 night fiend
1 dusk lord (printed)
There are a whole host of tokens and bits to print as well.
You can read a bit more about it here:
I am calling these done apart from a bit of tidying up and then the bases finishing. I might give the faces a bit of a wash as they do look a bit pale.
It would have made my life easier if my fine detail brushes hadn’t given up the ghost.
I think they will look a lot better when they get the sand or flock or whatever I decide upon onto the bases.
Because the bases are so raised then I can’t really just paint the bases. Which is a bit of a pain as whatever I put on is going to look massive by comparison.
I eventually ordered 200 40x20mm bases so when they arrive I will blast on with the infantry. As I am on a bit of a roll with 10mm I might crack on with some more Mongols.
I also managed to get a bit of paint onto the Gigantoraptor, these dinosaurs also fall into the neglected miniatures category.
Still another 5 to go out of the neglected dinosaurs. A triceratops, a tyrannosaurus, a parasaurolophus, a stegosaurus and a hatzegopteryx (a massive flying reptile in case you didn’t know). The total bugger is that four of them have earlier ones already painted. It would be good if I could match them in.
Well when I say almost done I actually mean the first unit is almost done.
Just the skin and hair to do, along with tidying up and a bit more highlights. Not quite sure where the zoomed in image went, but this one will do. I have stopped hating these now, I still don’t like the barding but, it will have to do 😬
As I had the brown paint out for the bases I gave this chap his first undercoat. I say first as I intend to give him two to hide the printer lines. They can really be seen on the following photograph
To be fair though I reckon I could tweak the printer settings to eradicate these a bit more. This was a test print to see how it went. But I suppose to look at it another way it weighs 4 Grams and at 0.018p per gram then it cost pence… and when looked at from this distance…
The lines are a lot less noticeable. I can tell who he is and that he is armed with a bow. So to be honest I am not going to worry about it that much. I will try another print sometime in the future with the Fat Dragon miniature settings dialled into the printer.
Tomorrow I hope to finish off the cavalry. There will be a short hiatus with the infantry as my 40×20 bases need to arrive.
Bogenwald 