Futurism

Been planning it for a while, black friday I pulled the trigger, over xmas I assembled and used it.

Anycubic Predator Delta Kossel. Apprently. Bit of a mouthful eh?

It's a midrange I bought on the basis of price, large build area (270mm round iirc), and rating, and it's an FDM printer rather than resin on the basis of toxicity (I can only really put it at the bottom of the kitchen). These things seem to always come with assembly required, the obviously not English first-language assembly guide aside - and with the horror-show of the anglophone world currently everyone should start getting comfortable with that - it was pretty painless to build, took about an afternoon.

Another awkwardness is the slicer software: it came with a very dated version of Cura which needed some googling and the screenshots in the manual to work out how to configure, but there aren't drivers for it for the current version of Cura so I'm using the ancient software and kinda long-grassing it. But it does work. For anyone familiar with Simon Wardley's work, it's pretty clear this industry is still in phase 2 of evolution at best. In hindsight I would advise anyone to pick a slicer they like and then find a standard printer that definitely has drivers for it, just for the ease of use - which means a prusa i3 or a creality ender probably.

Anyways, about 90% of a kilo of PLA later...

What you can see there is several pleasant evenings trawling thingiverse resulting in several piles of Star Wars Legions junk, a ruined Rhino - I'm especially pleased with spending about 2 or 3 quid of plastic on rather than the cost of a rhino kit - and a bunch of sci-fi civvy vehicles. Then there's a slew of epic scenery from the Troublemaker guys and some experimental walkways aimed at the shulk.

I did have a couple of mis-steps. The first loading vehicle I printed at 100% scale and it came in closer to 20mm scale than heroic 28, so these two are at 127%. I had a one print where it sheared strangely half way through - I assume it got knocked somehow - and I did one epic print which taught me the value of rafts and supports but otherwise it's been pretty painless. The rest of the reel I printed a bunch of cargo containers (one seen below) and crates. For the cost of a reel (16 quid) you really can make a ton of stuff.

So there are limits of course. FDM is nowhere near fine enough to reasonably make actual miniatures first and foremost. I understand resin printers can, but there's a price tag to that and it just seems like if that's what you want this for you should reconsider. The lamination is a real challenge, even on scenery. The material is a bit too hard for sandpaper to make much of an impact and the dust seems... really bad. I've yet to paint anything but I believe with a combination of putty - trying GS and liquid GS at the moment - and flock/sand as appropriate for scenery, it should work out. We shall see!

I also felt that curves do especially badly with lamination so I choose to just buy some wheels off zinge for the loaders (23mm ones for anyone interested). It seems to me that more organic things and somewhat counter-intuitively smaller scale things work best here. However what I wanted this for primarily was to build many copies of a component I knew I would need for my dungeon project, something I had to build the model for myself...

New year, new project then.