Tag Archives: 3D printing

Progress Report: 1st Quarter 2022, and an update.

In the past threee months I have painted 36 28mm miniatures and 71 20mm miniatures. I have painted 1 1/72nd scale kit and read 19 books.

My ill health sadly continues… will be looking at some different treatment options this month hopefully.

The 3d printer seems to have given up the ghost too… it had sat broken for a while until I had the time to try and repair it. I swapped out what I thought was the broken part but it still doesn’t work- although the part I did replace works OK. I’m not keen to chuick more money at it though. I’m pretty sure if I knew what I was doing with a multimeter and a soldering iron I could fix it, as I’m mostly sure it is a broken wire. The downside is that I’ve not used a multimeter since the mid 1990s and I don’t have the time with uni work to be messing with it too much. This does leave me wondering what to do with it now….?

Kill Team 2 – my Death Guard aganistEvan’s Tau. The rather nice terrain is all his work.

Been getting the odd game in- Kill Team 2 and 40k against Nicola plus some interesting online stuff too. Hope to do a bit more.

Cheers,

Pete.

From the Shed: 3d printed houses

Some of the last things I managed to get printed before my 3d printer glitched* were these houses from 18Charlie of Wargaming3D. I liked the modular approach he has taken to his designs so bought a log cabin, a tin roof and the fortified brick building.

From the set of files I’ve got three nice buildings. They did take a while to print but the cost of them is really quite low.I’m particularly keen on the fortified and sandbagged one. The good thing about this sort of thing is that the files were designed for 15mm, I up scaled them again to 20mm and may well print them out a bit bigger still for my 28mm Zona Alfa games. Either way they make a nice bit of terrain for any games set in Eastern Europe.

Cheers,

Pete.

*I’ve got the part to repair it I’ve just not had the time to do it yet.

From the Shed: A Couple of quick tank barriers.

I’ve just finished this book on the war in the Ukraine. An interesting little read for the ‘other side’ as it were.

These tank traps come from that conflict and were printed by me. The snow is a mixture of white tectured paint and 1mm white static grass. The figure amongst them is a 20mm US infantryman from Elhiem. Some tufts were added to which the static grass was glued.

Cheers,

Pete

EDITED TO ADD LINK TO THE ACTUAL BOOK

From the Shed: 6mm LCAC (Landing Craft Air Cushioned)

More from my printer: this time a rescaled (to 1/300th) LCAC from the ever prolific Mr. Bergman. The LAVs and M1 are also 3d printed. The sea spray is made from teased out teddy bear stuffing glued to the underside of the hovercraft before it was glued on its base.

The LCAC is used by the US Navy to transport troops, vehicles and Cargo from ship to shore, 1 MBT being at the upper end of its load limit. I’ll use mine for some US Marine landing in Norway I think, it should provide some interesting game scenarios.

Cheers,

Pete.

From the Shed: Varnishing disaster saved on Great War Tanks

I wanted to do some more Great War tanks in 15mm to go with my board game. I scaled up the Bergman design from 1/200th to 1/100th and ran off a pair of MKIVs. The plan was to paint them in German colours as captured tanks using the fancy new paint set I had got. The colours went on well and I was happy with the decals too… however, when it came to varnishing I got the dreaded white mist effect:

I was quite annoyed as you can imagine and nearly binned the models, such thoughts are only possible with the cheapness of 3d printing, but remembered that I had no more decals for them.

I risked revarnishing them on a dry day with gloss varnish, I vaguely remembered hearing somewhere that this work, and this managed to save them. See the reults here:

Really glad it did as they look pretty good now. Also it shows the limitations of scalling up a model to twice its size. Some of the detail is a little chunky now. At least it will survive game handling.

Cheers,

Pete.

From the Shed: Zuk vans and scatter terrain.

I previously posted a couple of examples of the Zuk van that I printed out in 20mm, this time I simply rescalled the 3D model file and reprinted them to match my 28mm models. As you have probably guessed these are heading into my Zone Alpha terrain collection.

I did one van a military green colour whilst the other is more beat up with different coloured doors and more rust.

The bit of scatter terrain is also 3D printed and should make a nice bit of setting for a bandit camp.

Cheers,

Pete.

From the Shed: Beute Panzer Platoon.

One of the tank history blogs that I follow (and highly recommend) is http://www.tankarchives.ca – a bit ago they did a post on French tanks in German service after 1940. After reading it I thought it would make a nice project for my 3D printer.

The tanks were sourced from the ever prolific Bergmann from Thingiverse. Doing this project really made me appreciate my £d printer as it is not something I would have done if I had to buy the resin models as before.

The tanks were actually all printed out a long time ago- just after the publication of the blog post- but have waited for paint until I got the decals for them. I wanted to num,ber them properly as one platoon: 331-335, third company, third platoon, tanks 1-5 with number 1 being the command Somua.

I may yet print out more and do them in the later camo scheme for use in Normandy and the Balkans towards the end of the war….

Cheers,

Pete.

From the Shed: East German Watch Towers (B- Turm)

Beobachtungsturm were a type of watchtower used by the East Germans. I found a file of them on thingiverse and thought it would be a great addition to my Cold War games.

As you can see I did 2 of them of different sizes. The nice thing about 3d printing is this fllexibility- a 1/144 scaled original was printed out at half size and twice size, for 6mm and 20mm respectively.

Here they are unpainted and untextured. They were both given coats of Mr. Surfacer as an undercoat.

Now to write 2 scenarios to featuring them….

Cheers,

Pete.