Alkmaar, Nederland. September 2021. Bugger.
Overall, September was a disappointing month, but it didn't start off that way.
After realising that my self-made busts were actually a lot smaller than the busts from the likes of Loot Studios, I decided to up the ante and see if I could get them to be a little bigger. I took one of the previous designs of a Balin-type bust and scaled it to something like 600%. I also decided to make things even more complicated for myself by changing the slicing software I used to Lychee.
Almost 6 hours later and the print was finished and post-processing could begin.
The new Big Balin is next to what used to be Big Balin.
A little bit of pancaking on the right elbow shows that the supports there weren't good enough, but overall a nice result. He's still smaller than the commercially available busts though.
A couple of days later I printed two busts from this month's Loot Studios release, Stinky Ancient Ruin. These were scaled at 80% size and since Loot are now using Lychee as their slicer of choice, I prepped the files using Lychee also.
Elisone Oleven
Enrico the Plum Druid. Yep, the names can be dumb, but the models are brilliant.
The following day I retried the wing of the Adult Red Dragon that had failed last month. This time I did the supports myself and gave them a little extra strength along the area they had previously failed. I also printed the 75mm Half-Elf rogue from Loot Studios Toll Collectors release from August. Both came out without any problems.
Here's the Half-Elf Rogue on the base which I printed the following day.
Since the dragon wing had printed just fine, I was now able to continue with the remaining pieces which I completed over the next two days, printing twice per day to finish it off.
The last pieces of the Adult Red Dragon were finally finished. All that remains now is to glue them all together and paint the damn thing.
Still having time to do another print run after finishing the dragon pieces I printed a really nice Ganesha Bust by Clay Cyanide, a lovely little City Watchman figure from Lion's Tower, that could easily be Discworld's Vimes and Shagdu, a Tabaxi Bard from Epic Adventure that I was going to use in my fantasy band. A 6-hour print left me with disappointing results. On the bust, most of the stand was missing, along with half of the elephant trunk and there was massive layer separation. The City Watchman was missing the bottom part of his cloak and sword. The only figure to print well was Shagdu.
Layer splitting clearly visible and the bottom wedge is supposed to be the base.
Vimes, missing part of his sword and the bottom part of his cloak.
At least Shagdu came out fine. Ready to rock it with the rest of the band.
So, once again having to clean the vat so it was almost a week before my next print run. This time, something I thought would be great. During the big summer sale on My Mini Factory, I'd purchased, amongst a load of other stuff, some rather nice looking Stargate figures. I loaded the plate up with the Royal Guard figures from Monstrous Encounters and off we went. Of the 23 items on the build plate, only two arms fell off their supports.
Stargate Royal Guards. Different bodies, lots of head and arm choices, what's not to like?
The following day I printed some of the figures from the Cursed Sands release of Titan Forge. Another really nice ancient Egyptian type of theme. Who knew I would become so addicted to that period figures? The Boat Queen figure showed signs of layering issues and a lack of detail. Others seemed to be missing some details.
Sethorus the Relentless.
Nanuru, Cunning of Ur.
Uneffer, Curse Apostle
Sharifa the Timeless. Broke a couple of things removing the supports.
The Boat Queen. Layering and missing details are easily visible.
With the success of the Stargate Royal Guards, I decided it was time for some SG-1 figures too. I also included some of the Royal Guards for a few more baddies. I've never had a build plate so crammed with models. I had 4 Royal Guard bodies, 4 neck harnesses for them along with the arms which failed last time they were printed. Along with that I also had 7 SG-1 bodies, 11 different heads and 23 different arms or arm combinations. All told over 50 items on the build plate. Amazingly enough, only 3 heads and 4 arms failed, deciding to stick to the FEP rather than the build plate.
SG-1 figures, not quite ready for action. Monstrous Encounters SG-1 figures.
Given the sudden increase in failures, I decided that maybe the build plate needed to be re-levelled. After doing that I also decided that the FEP was getting a bit too banged up and so could do with being replaced. The number of screws involved is horrendous. To make matters worse I changed the FEP on all my vats. Now there doesn't seem to be a foolproof way to determine if the FEP is tight enough, or too tight. Both can be disastrous for prints. If it's too tight it can tear and you're left with resin leaking all over your screen. Too slack and the models don't pop free of it.
So it was another 5 days later that my next print run was ready. It was not without some nervousness that I set the print going. This was some Napoleonic Wurtemberg Infantry from a Kickstarter I'd backed by Piano Wargames. The figures were incredibly well detailed, easily as good as anything I already had in plastic. The first print was 6 Line infantry, 6 Grenadiers and a Kickstarter exclusive officer.
I'd monitored the print several times during its run. I did think that there was less resin in the vat than I'd expected so was fearing a resin leak onto the screen. But that wasn't the case. So, 2 models simply fell off the supports at some point, one of these being the exclusive officer figure. One figure wasn't even there. No sign of it on the FEP or the build plate, a true deserter. And 3 figures had failures of supports resulting in missing arms etc.
The 3 gimps, missing arms and gunstock.
Successfully printed Grenadiers
The 3 successful Line Infantrymen
A weekend away followed by a week of being really ill effectively ended the printing for this month.
I had 11 print runs spread over 9 days and printed on 4 consecutive days for a total of 116 items with 21 failures. The printer was busy for 49 hours and 51 minutes, the longest print being the Adult Red Dragon wing retry at 8 hours 32 minutes. For those interested, the total print time for the Adult Red Dragon was 55 hours, this included the retry time. I have some more files prepared for next month which I hope will be without print failures.
Adult Red Dragon - Lord of the Print
The City Watch - Lion's Tower Adventurers Guild