The fabulous, amazing 2020 year end recap!

 Hi All,

Here is the obligatory year end recap post where I try to recall what all I did in the past year.

I realize that a lot of times my posts come across as a "What I did last Summer" essay so I'll try to be less dogmatic in my approach.

What I actually did

As per usual, we make plans we accomplish some and random things catch our attention.

3D Printed terrain

With the start of the pandemic I found myself the time to really start printing my 3D terrain. I apologize for no real glamor shots of this stuff, but another casualty of trying to contain my hobby so that my wife can use the home office, is that I have struggled to find a good place to set up for photography.

Fat Dragon Dungeon tiles.

Corvus Sector Corvus Prime War Layer style building.

Fat Dragon Village Streets tiles.

Corvus Isolation Protocol Building.

Bouncing back and forth between Fantasy and Sci Fi, I also have a few modern day things printed up for Zombie gaming, but nothing painted. The printer has been cold for the last few months as I got busy with other things. I hope to get back to it in the new year.

Scale Creep Group projects

To help each other with motivation, a bunch of us got together and did some projects on a theme. They were a lot of fun and a way to sort of plow ahead without having to thin to much.

The "Paint some kind of killer robot" challenge.

The "RTB01" challenge.

Whoops, not actually a Scale Creep Challenge, but I did challenge myself to get these painted so that we could have a dungeon crawl on my birthday. I did succeed at that.

The "Warzone" Challenge.

The "Mordheim" challenge.

The "Demon" challenge 1 of 2.

The "Demon" challenge 2 of 2.

The "Frostgrave Wizard and Apprentice" challenge.

The "Spooky Halloween" challenge.

The "Chaos Champion" challenge.

So these were a lot of fun and got me to paint way more than I would have as the ups and downs of the pandemic really made it hard for me to focus.

Local Group Projects

We ended up actually gaming a few times here locally before and after the peaks in the pandemic. We tried our best to still follow safe practices and so far seem to have been ok.

Isenguard Uruk Hai Scouts

Isenguard Uruk Hai Warriors.

We've played a few different games, but the latest has been Middle Earth Strategy Battle: Battle Companies. I think I've worked out the recipe for painting these guys. I just need to be a little more precise in the application.

Digital Art

While I did keep up with some Comic book battle reports, I'm a little behind on writing up some of the games I played this year.

But I did do this image representing a battle we had in our WFRP game.

It's a composite of about 5 different images that I then turned into a comic. The scene was my character, an Amber Wizard, had turned into a Raven to follow some cultists that had stolen something from the party while the rest of the party was bogged down in a battle. He ended up being harassed by a flock of pigeons while being shot out of the sky by another pigeon that was the familiar of a vampire.

I'd like to do more of this in the coming year, but I don't always get such clear ideas.

What I didn't get to

This year was the year of the rat, so I had intended to paint up my Skaven. To be honest I just wasn't feeling it when I started with a unit of Skaven Slaves.

I also got part way into some 15mm WW2 Soviets, but didn't finish them and moved on to other things.

My zombie gaming and Gaslands stuff didn't get very far. Oh well.

Here's to 2021!

Update for September through December

 Hi All,

Whoa! I'm sorry for not blogging for so long. I've been in a weird headspace, to be honest, and blogging just wasn't doing it for me. I think part of the problem was that I was getting a lot of spam from old blog conversations and it was making me question the Blogger platform. 

Anyway, I'll try to just keep on doing my thing and sharing what I can. Here's a few things I painted.

Sector Corvus Prime Warlayer style building with Warzone figure for scale.

Some of the Thingiverse freebies of the Isolation Protocol buildings. I backed the kickstarter and was printing files, but I had a bit of a snag changing filament brands and I have a couple of things I need to figure out for my plan of my Sci Fi table.

Good old Reaper Vampire Matthias the Twisted.

I painted these Isengard Uruk Hai Scouts for local games of Middle Earth Strategy Battle Game: Battle Companies. (Boy that's a mouthful.) I moved my photography space around and can't quite seem to get my shots right.

I don't know that they really stand up to close ups, but they're done and I got in two games with them.

We did another Scale Creep thing where we did Chaos Champions. He's only a Renegade, but his Mom thinks he's a Champion.

There are also some unfinished 15mm Soviets and I think I also completed my Cobblestone street layout for my Mordheim table. But both of those are not really worth showing at the moment.

So, I hope you and your families are all well and that you are getting in as much hobby as you can to take some of the edge off of these trying times. Stay well.

Hot End Swap for Creality Ender 3

 Hi All,

As I've mentioned, I've been printing a lot on my Ender 3. Unfortunately I missed that the bowden coupler on the hot end had worked loose. This must have caused a gap between the end of the bowden tube and the nozzle which lead to a clog. I cleared out the clog and replaced the bowden tube which had partially melted. Unfortunately the next print clogged as well and a second cleaning attempt lead me to believe that the inside of my heat sync was gunked up and I didn't have confidence that I would be able to get the bowden tube to seat correctly and prevent further clogs.

So after a little research into various hot ends I decided to just go ahead and order a replacement stock one. This particular model has the upgraded Capricorn bowden tube.

I should say here, unplug your printer and it's probably a good idea to pull the sd card as well, just to be on the safe side.

So the hot end is very easy to pull off. Just those two screws pull it off. In the picture you can see I broke down the old one even further. You don't need to do that, I just did when I was trying to figure out what was going on with the old one.

What I didn't show was my clipping all the zip ties. One at the hot end, tightening the wires and cover. Two holing the bowden tube to the wire trace, and a fourth one that was inside the motherboard case holding that end of the wiring together.

Above you can see where I removed the old hot end control wire. Supposedly it's labeled, but I couldn't read it. I also noted after I pulled it that the manufacturer had hot glued the connector in. So you may want to remove that glue first.

The last two terminals in that strip are to connect the heating element for the nozzle. The screw driver you get with your printer tools loosens these. This picture also shows that I have fed the new wires back through the plastic mesh wire tube.

At this point I was having trouble getting the heater cables into the wiring block so I decided to remove the motherboard from the case. It is held in by four pretty stiff screws. I also had to remove the bed plate to really get at it.

This last picture is just to show how you want to insert the stripped wire end above the little metal piece. Tightening the screw will pull it up and make a tight connection with the wire.

I then put in new zip ties in the places where I removed them. Perhaps I should have documented the removal and replacement.

Button everything back up and test it out. You should be good to go.

I still need to run some test prints and dial my settings in. I've printed two scenery pieces since installing this and there are some print flaws right now. I'll let you know what I had to change.

Thanks for looking.

Ambiguously Magical Duo - Another Scale Creep Project

 Hi All,

Well, we had another group painting project. We're sort of calling them challenges, but they are super laid back and there are no prizes. Also the deadlines have been fairly flexible. We're just friends trying to give each other mojo to paint along a theme.

Anyway this one was to paint a wizard and his apprentice, nominally for Frostgrave and potentially to expand upon the Mordheim figures we did earlier. Here are mine.

I did Magnus the Bright from Advanced Heroquest and Telor from Heroquest as my Sorcerer and Apprentice pair.

As always I encourage you to go to Scale Creep and see the other submissions here.

I painted Magnus with Reaper paints, except for the stonework which was Citadel Contrast.

Same for Telor. Initially I had tried to 3D print him from some files I found online, but I don't have my settings right for printing figures on my filament printer. Maybe some day, but not right now.

Anyway not much to add to this. I figured I'd spare you pictures of failed prints etc. I'm trying to keep you all informed, but not bogged down in the minutia.

I hope to have some more posts up soon. I'm working on a battle report and I replaced the hot end on my printer so I have some pictures of how I did that.

Thanks for stopping by. Keep hobbying.

What's on the Workbench.

 Hi All,

I'm sorry for the lack of posting. Things have been really busy both in hobby and real life, but blogging and keeping up with blogs has really fallen by the wayside.

My latest gamer ADD thing are these Corvus Games Terrain buildings.

These are the thingiverse freebies of the upcoming Isolation Protocol Kickstarter. They use the Waylayer system and I think they look great.

This is the Sector Corvus Prime Openlock freebie from thingiverse. It got me to buy the whole Sector Corvus Prime Bundle. So you'll be seeing that soon I hope.

And this is the Sector Corvus Prime Warlayer style building. Ignore the tile on the bottom, I had a clog that caused a print failure.

So I'm jumping around printing this and some fantasy streets for a Mordheim board. I also need to get on printing the Mortis Vallis Kickstarter, but I'm fixated on printing some sci fi stuff and getting it on the table.

Got some stuff in the pipeline, so stay tuned.

You say Demons and I say Daemons: Another Scale Creep "Challenge"

 Hi All,

While there has been more going on behind the scenes than the blog would show, there hasn't been all that much that was interesting. Just sort of mundane hobby slow burn.

What did happen was a bunch of us, through the prompting of Spevna, painted some demons. Go check it out on the Scale Creep Blog here. There are some truly fantastic figures and paint jobs there. My personal favorite is Blue in VT's homage to Pete Taylor's Lord of Change. But honestly it's super hard to pick a favorite because they are all so good.

Anyway, my portion of the post is actually quite boring, but I was very inspired by this challenge.

After screwing about on eBay I got this Keeper of Secrets. As I mentioned on Scale Creep, I have the other three Greater Demons of Chaos, I just can't find them in my pile of shame right now.

I tried contrast on this model at first, but I failed. So I ended up using my Purple craft paint. It looks ok, but I have some proper model paint on order for future projects. Craft paint is starting to annoy me.

After failing with contrast on the KoS I decided to break out the Demonic Lasher from Reaper and try my hand at Contrast again.

After airbrushing the primer from black, through grey to a zenithal white I used Citadel contrast to block in the base colors. This time I located my contrast medium and thinned them about 1:1, 1.5:1. Contrast works way better if you start with a little preshading and thin them with the contrast medium. I still have a lot more experimenting to do to get the hang of these paints though. I think these "challenges have feed me up to experiment a little more. I also felt freer with this figure as I had already finished one and this was a bonus.

I then used Reaper paints to do the mandril faces, suction cups and spines/bones. I also drybrushed the scales and tentacles with reaper paints.

Anyway, thanks for looking and I hope to have an update on hobby stuff sooner rather than later.