I added a 3D-printer to my hobby-arsenal

Right after posting Bolt Action Airborne Infantry on a very appropriate data, my blog went silent. Sorry about that. In all honesty work caught up with me and when you write for a living, writing for fun takes a back seat in busy periods. But the summer's picking up, marketeers are going on vacation and they tend to take their freelancer budgets with them. Good for me, it'll give me some time to paint and hobby. I've already gotten a bit of a head start by slapping paint on a model that rolled of my latest investment: a 3D-printer. What an adventure (cough, cough).

Bob the Troll likes long walks on the beach and posting 'opinions' on Twitter.

A 3D-printer was an investment I'd been meaning to make for a long time (no more bothering my brother with print requests). Above picture obviously isn't the 3D-printer, but the result of printing my very own 'Aquatic Troll', an STL-file* I got for free on Cults3D. Now before you start digging a hole big enough to burry the HQ building of a certain Nottingham-based miniatures company in (shame on you by the way: don't burry buildings, you can repurpose them #circular-building, #enviroment)), I'd advice you to think again. It took me over eight hours to print this one troll (it took decidedly less time to paint it). I was exposed to chemical fumes and I burned through a rather horrendous amount of expensive resin just to get to grips with my 'off the shelf' printer. Count in the cost of the printer itself, the washing station and consumables and I think I could've bought two Troll armies for non-discounted GW prices. In other words, I don't think 3D-printing is quite ready for mainstream succes just yet :).

* The file format 3D-printing software uses to generate files that 3D-printers actually understand.

This is a very, very 'before' picture of my 3D-printing workspace. By now it has multiple bottles of resin *a lot* more gloves and an industrial sized paper towel roll. (and a lot of accumulated gunk, despite valiant efforts to keep the workspace clean).

Anyway back to the printer. Here's a shot of my garage that contains the set-up. The machine on the right is an Anycubic 3D Photon Ultra DLP printer. The machine on the left washes prints and then exposes them to more UV-light to properly harden the resin. In picking a 3D-printer I first had to choose between melting little strands of plastic into so-so models that most definitely cannot be washed or drybrushed. These so-called PLA printers are cheaper in use, don't require toxic resin and don't produce a lot of deadly fumes. The alternative is a resin printer. They are expensive, you need gloves to use them and they stinks to hell and back. But the results are so worth it, I just had to have one. As the owner of a house built in the seventies I still have an environmentally insane garage with big vent holes to let the lead-laced car exhaust fumes out after you parked your vehicle inside your house. I have a bit of trouble following the logic of my ancestors, but I am rather happy with the well ventilated space :).

My first 3D-print. The miniature orb to be printed for testing purposes did not quite come out as planned....

Assuming you have a well-ventilated space to set-up your resin printer, you get two choices within (marginally) sane people prices (as of this writing). The usual suspects use SLA  technology, the new-fangled ones use DLP. 'What's that?', you say. Well, a resin printer uses a big metal plate on a stick (on a spiraling axis to be a bit more precise). This metal plate (the build plate) is dipped into a rectangular reservoir containing resin. Once submerged all the way to the bottom the printer activates a UV-emitting light array below the reservoir (it has a transparant bottom (that can spring a leak)). The light array, either SLA (a laser) or DLP (a projector) forms the shape of one tiny layer that will be part of your miniature. Where the light hits the resin, it solidifies and sticks to the big metal plate or the layer that came before it (that's the plan at least). The build plate lifts to let excess resin leak off and then dips down again for another layer. It's quite fascinating to watch. In theory. You have to be a zen-master that has gotten bored of watching rocks grow to spend a lot of time gawking at your slow, slow 3D-printer in action to be honest (besides its hard to make out anything through the blue plastic cover).

Freshly printed top section of a Thunderhawk. On this bit I learned multiple things. For one you have to add holes to your print to let excess resin leak out or your model (that was too big for the build plate and is malformed). Not adding hole will keep resin inside the box you printed. It will leak on your desk as it slowly tears the model apart over the course of days. And it will smell bad too.

The most important choice I had to make for my resin printer (after my wife instructed me not to buy a cheap one that would get replaced within months (I married well)) was if I wanted a bigger build plate or a DLP printer. The size of the build plate determines how big a model you can print in one go. SLA printers (can) have bigger build plates (useful for printing scenery and vehicles), but the laser lasts on average about 2.000 hours (meaning you get to print around 2 to 3 model /s). A DLP projector lasts around 20.000 hours and produces better detail on top of that. That cinched it for me. I bought a DLP printer with a smallish build plate (10.2 x 5.7 cm with a height of 16.5 cm (~4 x 2.2 inch and 6.5 inch high). I figured I'd just cut bigger models up and stick them together with superglue when the time came (I have been known to do that to multi-part plastic kits in the past ;). 

Never one to be held back by things like 'common sense' I kept \printing bits of the Thunderhawk. On the left you can see the first tears forming in the printed top bit (bottom left of the picture). I wasted a lot of resin on parts that look okay in this picture, but did not come out completely right. I did learn a lot about using Meshmixer though, so there was a definite upside there.

I was not entirely right on that count. The maximum height of the 3D-printer adds to the size of the model you can print. But practically you don't want heavy bits too high up. For one you need to angle everything to the plate to get good results. Second the model can get too heavy if you print something truly big. Say - for arguments sake - a certain blogger (we'll not name) ignored that sage bit of advice  you find everywhere on 3D-printing sites and went ahead going for a maximum sized box. Well word has it that print came out deformed, another sagged during printing and a third fell off its supports halfway through the process and ended up floating in wasted resin. Long story short (word has it) you can't build very big models with a small build plate unless you have the patience of a saint, good ways to deal with failure (mentally) and a long held wish to buy (expensive) resin in bulk. If big vehicles are on your list, get a printer with a big build plate. If you want detailed miniatures, buy a DLP printer.

I stuck the usable parts of the Thunderhawk together anyway...it was about as malformed as the average cast by a company that's named after fictitious worlds that forge stuff (so to speak).I got a bit tired of printing bad casts, so I paused this project for a bit (above is the result of over a week of almost continuous printing (misprints not shown (ambition to buy a second 3D-printer for large bits also not shown)). 

Oh dear, I'm in the rambling part of a post. So much to say, I should push some of this stuff over to extra posts. Back to some basic things I learned. You cannot attach a 3D-printer directly to your computer. Not even if you Google for a long time using creative search terms like 'human operable 3D-printer' and '3D-printer that sort-of works like an actual printer'. You do get some fun retrospectives of printing (on paper) in the eighties. Ah my old dot matrix, how I miss your annoying noise. When it comes to 3D-printers you either have to bungle around with one of those annoying slivery micro SD-Cards (that you will lose constantly) or get a printer that takes USB-sticks (with a classic USB-B interfae that never goes in the right way on the first try). There are also 3D-printers that communicate through wifi, but honestly that's a bit useles. A quick print takes 2 to 3 hours and serious print times easily hit 16+ hours. That make a USB-stick not - that - inconvenient. You have to fill the resin reservoir half the time anyway (and clean the entire bloody machine after a mishap the other half of the time). 

The sweet taste of success. Two gobbo's are ready to cast their nets at hapless opponents, as soon as I've figured out a smart way to paint Night Goblin robes (off to the White Dwarf archives (wheee!)).

Yes this post is getting long, I'll slap some extra 'lessons learned' in the captions of accompanying photos and keep more info for another post. Long story short. After wasting a lot of resin trying to print a Thunderhawk in parts, I almost tired of my new 3D-printing adventures hobby. Too many failures in a row tend to demotivate me (I think that applies to most human beings). Around that time my wife quite kindly pointed out I didn't buy the machine for vehicles. Deciding she was right (once again) I decided to print a couple of Night Goblins (going by a slightly more IP-friendly nickname). I have yet to fully paint these two goblins (black robes on Night Goblins, I need help there!) But I quickly followed up with the troll pictured above in the post and directly below this sentence.

Bob the Troll shows the part where he form his Twitter-opinions to the world. You can see DLP has the chops to spew out a seriously well detailed miniature. I can't wait to get cracking on some paid STL's.

Lets finish off by showing the back of this model. Now most free STL's are not quite good (to put it mildly). So aside from paying for your printer, expect to pay for files to print as well (and consumables like resin, paper towel and (hideously expensive) cleaning fluids). Long story short: if you want to hobby on the cheap, go to people that use injection molds and plate-spun metals to get your models (or the secondhand aftermarket). But if you want to add another dimension to the hobby. One where you curse your stars as your valiant efforts turn to miserable failure. If you want to add going to the brink of despair to the hobby, only to be pulled back at the last minute by printing something that actually looks like a goblin. If you want to enrich your hobby life by adding so much frustration that in you actually celebrate that one pretty goblin (and its cousin) with an ice cold beer and the sweet, sweet taste of victory. Then 3D-printing is for you. 

I took a lot of pictures of the control screen of my printer. Mostly because I've gotten to the age where I need reading glasses to see small letters. Not having a pair around my printer made taking a picture and zooming in, the only way to see how much longer I had to wait for a print (getting old is fun!). This screen developed a defect. The top half started ignoring me while the bottom half was pretending to be the top half. 

Just as a post-script. My brand new printer developed a problem with its LCD-touchscreen as I wrote this. It is on its way to repair right now. Let's hope that falls under warranty. What a brave new world of hobby we've entered, it reminds me of first getting an airbrush (at the start that was a bloody, clogged up piece of ++++transmission lost+++++

If you have any question about 3D-printing for the miniatures hobby, feel free to ask them and I'll use my weeks (yes weeks!) of experience to try and contrive an answer.