3D Printing

 Hi I’m Chris, a Westerhope Wargame Group gamer in exile (only in North Yorkshire). Paul has asked me to pop a post on the blog about my new toy a 3D printer!

When my friend said he was selling his old 3D printer I jumped at the chance.

The technology is amazing and fascinating. The first thing I printed was a pirate penguin. I chose this as it was a free file on a Kickstarter and it was small.

The print quality wasn’t top notch but it had been a good experiment. I adjusted the settings and discovered that there’s a whole world of 3D files on the internet. Most of them free!

I tried a few small pieces. Boxes and the like. Then progressed to a 17 hour print...

An Imperial Dalek shuttle!

I wargame a variety of ‘periods’. Doctor Who is one of my prized collections. It might not look much, but by BBC prop department standards it’s a thing of beauty lol!

This is the finished model on the print bed. I did pay for the file for this model. £7!

You need slicing software to ready whatever 3D file you have to something the printer will understand. I use Cura slicing software. This is free to download. As you might understand from ‘slicing’ the printer needs to know what the model looks like horizontal slice by slice. 

Manipulating a 3D file in Cura soon becomes easy. 

I then found a model I liked that was too big for my printer. The print bed is about 200mm x 200mm. 

Hmmm...

So I had to learn some more software! This one is called Meshlab and allows you to do a lot more with the 3D files than the slicer software. It was also free to download. I simply cut up the file into 4 separate models. I’m still working on this model. At the moment I have the main parts of the armoured train printed. Together the 4 vehicles are over 2’ long! I’ve made them undersized rather than true 28mm 1/56th scale which would have looked far too big on the tabletop 

Each of these parts took about 6 hours to print. 

The Orlik being prepared in Meshlab free of the other three parts of the train. 

I’ve printed a few other odds and sods. It’s quite addictive and continues to fascinate. As I’m writing this I can just hear the printer upstairs creating some more dragons teeth anti-tank defences. I feel a bit less of a dinosaur!