maandag 21 oktober 2019

The future is 3D...

Hmmm, I've gone quiet for a bit again, haven't I?
Stuff happened (family stuff, a case of the flu, just general real-life nuisances).
But a little over a week ago, I received my newest toy/tool: An Ender 5 3d printer.
I've been debating if/how badly I need/want one for the past year or so.
In the end it came down to the realisation that I don't have the swathes of time and energy my younger me used to have.  And that to actually have a chance of finishing some of the more, ahem, megalomaniacal projects I started in the past, I need to work more efficiently. Handcrafting a repetetive item "x" times for a scenery project may have been fine in the past. But now I can design/download it once, and print several of them, while I get a good night's sleep at the same time. :)
As I had the past week off, I took some time to get to know the machine and calibrate it.
I'm already through half a kilo spool of filament, and the other half is going fast as wel...
 Here's some of the stuff I printed:

The first two prints, after the little cartoon piggy provided by the manufacturor:

I also printed some upgrade bits for the printer itself:  A bracket to take strain of a cable that is known to be damage prone. And a set of supports for the semi-freefloating print bed, to reduce layer lines a bit more.


After using most of the white PLA provided by the manufacturor of the printer, I switched to the dark grey PLA I bought.  And print quality immediately went up.
Even more when I got some tweaking in:
 The base on this thing is 40mm in diameter, to give a sense of scale...

Ofcourse I had to see how certain items looked painted:
A Sister of Battle ( a somewhat rough print, being done in low-grade PLA and before any calibrating) in 54mm aka Inquisitor scale:




And to celebrate upcoming Halloween (as well as try a larger print) I printed Cthulhu:


Oh, and this is what half a kilo of plastic filament got me:
Some wall pieces for Necromunda/zone Mortalis. Detail bits for my Space Hulk/Multiverse gaming terrain projects. A set of terminals for Cyberpunk gaming, a set of (too large) BFG escorts, a set of 25mm diameter bases/battery holders,  a Necromunda token, a dead Fallout person and an icon of an ancient evil.... Not bad. Missing from this overview is a couple of calibration prints, a handfull of support structures, and one of the printer's bed support arms.

Oh, and as I have a spool of translucent PETG as well, I had to give this a try:
 A virtual entity for use in cyberpunk skirmish games. It's a translucent print glued atop a 25mm diameter base/battery-and-led-holder.


See you next time!