My Workbench

Tuesday, August 24, 2021

First New Post Since April

 Hello to all of my blogger friends! So sorry to have abandoned you and my blog for so long. After getting my 3D printer at the end of last March, I spent several days tuning it up. Then I went crazy printing ships in 1/700 and 1/1200 scales! I even printed a few 1/1000 and 1/300 scale ships. The ships were mostly Napoleonic, but I also printed some ACW ironclads and some 1/2400 ancient ships I scaled up to 1/1200. I now have boxes of them. Here are just a few of the prints that I took pictures of:

This is how I mark them so I know for later







The 1/700 scale ships I've printed

Now here are the 1/1200 scale:

Ironclads

Brits

French

Spaniards

Swedes, Danes & Russians

And the ancients:

Carthaginians and Romans
 

This is what they look like painted 

Then something strange started happening. The quality of the prints began to diminish. The PLA feed was restricted for some reason and in addition, the prints were breaking away from the plate no matter how much I ensured the level. after replacing nearly everything, I gave up. But it is ok because I printed enough for two life times! The only time I grit my teeth is when one of the two main designers puts out another new ship that I don't have twenty of! 



About the time the print quality was deteriorating, the weather started getting nice. So I have been working outdoors pretty steady since the middle of May. The exception was when we had the record heat wave the end of June. But I still didn't get much hobby time in. Since then we have moved my youngest daughter out to her first apartment and nearly got evacuated due to a nearby fire that burned over 18,000 acres and got within 3 miles of the house. That was Monday night the 16th, and the whole week was stressful wondering if they were going to get it contained. Fortunately the weather cooled off and we got a little rain, which helped tremendously.

All summer though, occasionally I would work on something in the evening. It might be 15 minutes, maybe 20, whenever the mood would strike. one of the projects I completed was scratch building all of the masts for the 1/700 printed hulls I painted in March, before I got the printer. 

Seven 3rd rate sets & five 1st rate sets

So that pretty much catches us up to the present. 

Last night I finished the Argonauta but wanted to get this catch-up post done first before I post it.

Thanks for looking.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good to see things are going well. It's been an interesting fews months here in washington, that's for sure.

The printed ships look awesome, how long before you have a miniature version of every sailing warship that took to the seas?

A Miniatures Hobby Room said...

Haha, well between my 1/1200 and 1/700 collections I probably have every miniature variant that has been produced so far. But I have only managed to build a small fraction of the total. So I pride myself in having a respectably sized lead pile! And now my plastic/resin pile is growing too!

Where are you in Washington Tom?

Jonathan Freitag said...

You are still alive! Great news! You have been busy with your 3D printing. So much that you wore out the printer. You have a fine pile of freshly pressed models.

Anonymous said...

I'm in Tacoma.

caveadsum1471 said...

Great to see you back! Doesn't sound great with your printer, sensibly you've laid down a substantial stock though!
Best Iain

A Miniatures Hobby Room said...

Indeed I do, but will I ever get to all of them? Hmmm...questionable!

A Miniatures Hobby Room said...

Probably too many, but then again, can one really have too many minis? I think not!

Stew said...

Glad that you got a lot of use out of your printer before it broke. But that does sound fast for something that expensive to become a paper weight. 😀
Glad that the fire didn’t touch you.

A Miniatures Hobby Room said...

Oh it won't be a paperweight Stew. I'll figure it out. I just need to spend the time on it. Winter is coming! And Simon Mann has designed three more Spanish ships as my incentive.