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.

Strange Ranges - Warzone Challenge

Hi All,

Well, we did it again. Challenged each other to paint some figures from the game Warzone. Now I've never played the game and the figures are over the top, but have a certain charm. It seems like a line designed to look like 40k cosplay.

Now despite what some eBay sellers might lead you to believe, you can still get many of these figures from Prince August, here.

I considered buying from them but found a reasonable deal on a bonkers mix of figures on eBay, so I punted and won them.

Once again, I highly recommend you go over to the Scale creep blog and read about all the other Warzone figures here.

This is what I ended up with.

This is what arrived in the mail.

Next were the id's

I keep on calling him Bubba, so Bubba he shall be. To me this figure epitomizes warzone.

Laura's spear was broken so I cut it off at the hand and rebuilt it from tubing, greenstuff and plasticard.

So the rebuild has some issues, but I think it gets the idea across. Perhaps painting the bottom as a gem was a mistake. I'm not sure.

I could not find the last figure in the catalog. These guys are the closest I could find for the third figure.

I'm calling him a demonic proctologist.

So, do you have any unusual ranges you like? Are there more gems that passed me by?

Thanks for looking, and give these figures a try. They are super fun.

Editing STL files - Necromunda

Hi All,

So you may or may not have seen these great Sci Fi buildings that Bulldoglopez and Axiom have been building out of old Necromunda bulkhead sections.

Now I had thought that Bulldoglopez had blogged about it, I was wrong. Axiom, however, has here. In fact, he is such a consummate gentleman he has blogged Bulldog's as well at the end. I'll wait while you read it. When you do you'll realize why I got excited about hab building.

My first issue was that I didn't have any of the old Necromunda tiles. What's a guy locked in his house with a 3d printer to do? 

First, search the term "Necromunda Bulkhead" on Thingiverse. I tried several and they had real problems with ovehangs straight out of the box. I had to figure out how to get usable prints. After failing with the split, flat on the build plate, files I figured I could cut the vertical files in Meshmixer. 

I still had to print with supports, but  it seemed to print fairly well.

Not too bad, but those supports are a pain to get out.

So back to the drawing board and fix those parallel to the build plate files. That handle had to go. it started on the third layer and just made it a nightmare to print.

It's hard to get perfect in Tinkercad but it prints flat.

Seven and a half-ish hours, not too bad. This particular print made me realize I had some more tweaking to go as the top right door piece had a void around the sides and the top on the back. Why the OP did that baffles me.

But they did print. Just a little bit of lifting on a few corners.

I also realized after this that the fill in the bottom pair was too thin. So I thickened it up a little.

Now I had been super resistant to Tinkercad because I like to have software on my computer so I can work on things offline. After a couple of friends showed me what they were doing with Tinkercad, I got over myself. Now I'm addicted to adding stuff to the bulkheads.

Then I remembered there were some bulkhead frames. I had to cut off the top handle on the right and some connectors between the two halves.

But I wanted to rotate the halves so that they sat on the plate like the other models, but I didn't know how to separate the parts. As you can see here, I figured it out.

A little verbose GoogleFu later.

Here's this guys video. Thanks Chaos Core Tech.

He's using an older version of Tinkercad, but you can still do what he says.

Thanks for looking, and I hope to have some habs to show you soon.

Simple SciFi Building

Hi All,

Hope that stay at home protocols have been seeing you stay well. We're in the last 5 days or so of school.

I made some "improvements" to my printer that ended up not working for me, so I reverted back except I kept my Estep calibration.

In the meantime Cura 4.6 has been released and Tom Tullis of Fat Dragon Games has released new Cura profiles for terrain and miniatures.

I've since printed the missing walls. I think I'm going to turn this into a gun shop. I'll need to print out those things from the Tycho Streets and Bazaar set.

I've really been knocking my head against how to print this building out. There are a lot of overhangs that just don't print right for me. Part of the problem was the mods I made, but I also just can't figure out the best way to print it. I may just print the basic walls and then glue scifi bits to them. We shall see.

In the meantime I've finished painting all the dungeon tiles and hope to be tricking my wife and daughter into playing AHQ with us soon. One thing that is holding me up is I feel like I need to have some good female miniatures for them to use to feel more invested. Sadly I don't have very many and certainly not very many painted up.

Anyway, I hope to post a little more regularly and get back to checking in with your blogs, I've been a bad blogger for awhile now.

Happy hobbying.

Ender 3 - Doing it wrong until you get it right

Hi All,

Well it took a lot of trying and setting, and re-setting things on the Creality Ender-3, but I managed to get my first print done.

I thought, perhaps a little naively, that I could set it up out of the box and let it rip. It comes partially assembled and putting it together has a very IKEA furniture feel about it.

If you take the plunge I highly recommend the Official Facebook Group here. In the files section is an extensive guide for assembling and tweaking your Ender-3, written by Luke Hatfield. Also lots of people on the group who can give you help if you show them pictures of what is going on.

I also highly recommend Chuck Hellebuyck's Filament Friday (CHEP) youtube channel here, specifically this video with the links to his gcode for bed leveling and test printing to check the bed level.

The first thing I did wrong was pinch the z-limit wire under the vertical support beam. I had tried to hold it out of the way multiple times while assembling and didn't realize I had let it slip under once again. I pancaked the wire pretty bad in two places, fortunately for me it still works. I would advise taping it well out of the way while assembling.

The next problem I had was the cross beam that holds the print head. I had a 6mm difference between the left and right sides. CHEP talks about adjusting the left side and I did that about 5 times and couldn't get it right. Finally I loosened and re-tightened the right and got it straighter, fixing the difference to within 2mm.

I then ran the CHEP bed level, using a post it to set the nozzle height (not shown). Then I ran the test. Success! I ran my fingers over the corners to see if it was sticking to the bed. I then peeled that off and set a print I found on thingiverse to print.

I probably should have run the bed level code again. The lighter look of the line on the right seems to indicate the bed is too high on that side.

But I let it run and ended up with a pretty good first print in a little under an hour and a half.

I had some trouble getting the print off the print bed. The stock scraper was a tad too thick to get under a corner, but I had this tool for slicing clay and sculpey and it worked a treat.

I think I'm going to print up some more bits for making up sci-fi buildings. I've also got some Fat Dragon Games stuff for making dungeon tiles and Space Ship tiles I'm looking forward to trying out.

Thanks for looking, and I hope you can learn something from my folly.

Monolith Con 2019 - Space Hulk: Exterminate

Hi All,

Next up was a tense game of Space Hulk. Airbornegrove played the stealers and Bulldog Lopez, Cheetor, Maj Guiscard and I played the Terminators.

As with all Space Hulk games it was utter carnage.

It really went down to the wire. I really regretted my decision to not blow myself up and take the Genestealer with me. Maj. Guiscard really saved our bacon.

Next up: "Warcry: Untamed Beasts vs. Iron Golems"

Monolith Con 2019 - Get to the Shuttle

Hi All,

Like all the best trilogies, this one had three parts. My squad proved to be inept yet again. I'm sensing a pattern.

Enjoy!

I set myself up in cover and then the other side got all their activations first, so I was immediately suppressed and couldn't do anything. This essentially continued for the whole game. Oh well. Time to start working on another unit and come back to these guys later.

Next up: "Space Hulk: Exterminate"

Monolith Con 2019 - There's Dung in them thar Hills

Hi All,

The next game in our trilogy was to locate the rare "Great White" Dunger and add to our supplementary income.

Let's get to the mayhem.

Once again the men of Borborygmus Prime get the short end of the stick. It may be time to make a new squad.

Up Next: "Get to the Shuttle!"

Monolith Con 2019 - The Great Dunger Round Up

Hi All,

In our next series of games we focused on the great Dunger herds of New Texas. The first scenario was to follow the herd on their migration and try to catch as many as we could. Bulldog made special vehicle templates and the board scrolled as we chased them.

Cheetor and Airbornegrove supplied the Dunger herd, funky looking models from Ramshackle Miniatures.

Sorry about the double picture of the crashed vehicle. I didn't notice it until near the end of the process and didn't feel like reformatting the comic. I feel like this comic feels a little drier than the game actually was, I probably didn't take the right pictures.

Next up: "There's Dung in them thar hills!"