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.

Mordheim: 5 a side

Hi All,

Not exactly sure what the hold up has been on the blogging front, but I've been busy with real life and hobby projects. Although now that I think of it it could be the PS4 we bought.

Anyway after the Warzone "challenge" Cheetor suggested painting up a few fantasy figures that one could slot into Mordheim/Frostgrave/Rangers of Shadowdeep games with an emphasis on fitting the Mordheim warband guidelines.

So participants were encouraged to pick a faction and paint up a Leader, Hero and three henchmen. Sounds pretty straight forward. So I had big plans to do two warbands, but then procrastinated and only finished the one.

I encourage you to go over to Scale Creep here and read all of the entries. There are some excellent figures represented.

Here is mine.

A fun mix of figures. Three GW later edition Flagellants, Dragon Bait Cleric Adventurer and Reaper Bones Witch Hunter looking dude.

Jakob Knochengard 44013 is currently out of stock, but a fun little mini. The Bones Black material is better than the white bones material, but I still prefer metal miniatures. You can't beat the price though.

Joachim Pumpernickel is a Dragon Bait Cleric. A fun model with a lot of  stuff on him. I have a bunch of figures from this range that I need to paint.

Berchtwald

Horst

Klaus

Not much to say about these guys, they are kooky. I used a LePen 0.05 marker to write on the sandwich boards.

Thanks for looking. I should have something else up soon.

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.

Advanced Heroquest - First Quest

Hi All,

Well, after painting those figures in near record time, we had our first game of Advanced Heroquest (AHQ).

I had no idea of what I was doing and had read the rules through about 5 or 6 months ago so it wasn't super streamlined. Having been derailed by too much searching through the rules before during games, I just went with it as best I could and relied on Google to help me through not being prepared.

This is what transpired.

So I started by deciding that 4 wall/corridor sections were the equivalent of one AHQ dungeon section. For future games I will have sections preassembled to go. I also learned I need to print way more clips, I ran out pretty fast.

The dungeon was bare of monsters or rooms for that matter. I know I forgot to roll for encounter chits or whatever it is after turn 3. Something about the Game Master rolling a die on their turn and taking a chit on a 1 or a 12. Honestly I was foggy on that. I also thought that there were premade monster matrices in the rule book. It seems I was wrong. So I went to the internet and found a table to roll on. That gave me the Quest room behind the door which contained 6 orcs and 3 orc champions plus 120 gold and something about 12 PV I found it here on Yumpu. I didn't read it, just quickly used the Quest room table.

All in all successful, but I'll have to go in and really have a look at the rules to be more comfortable with the game.

Thanks for looking.