1st Project With a 3D Printer

 So I got a 3D printer for Christmas. It's a Bambu Lab A1 Mini and it has been great. 

I've printed the obligatory Benchy (that's what it was doing above) and some accessories (printer poop basket, toolbox, and scraper). It's now time to put it to its true purpose: printing stuff for my miniatures.

I've had 300 15mm Zulus for a while and I've stagnated in painting them. I also recently (relatively) aquired The Men Who Would Be Kings rules. These rules use individual figures for casualties, so the obvious solution is to create movement trays for them, because why move 12-16 inividual figures when you can move just a couple of trays?

I've started with an artillery tray because it only have 4 figures on it. I have quite a few figure bases saved (courtesy of the Canadian government) and so I designed the stands to fit them. I should have enough to base all of my Zulus and British, but then I will have to look for alternatives for other periods.

 In TMWWBK, every unit has a leader, so I wanted to have a specific spot for him. I experimented with pausing printing and swapping from the grey filament to a white filament, and it worked reasonably well. The text a little smudgy, but it should look OK after I apply some flock and other terrain.

The leader also has a rating. But because the leader rating can vary from unit to unit, I didn't want to make it a permanent feature of the stand. Instead, I will be creating some labels and an area on the stand to put them. To keep the labels in place, I'm using mini magnets.

These pictures are showing my prototypes. I think I've got them pretty much dialed in to how I want them, so now I'll start cranking them out. I'll be  swapping out the grey filament for brown, and if I'm lucky I may not even need to prime the trays.

Any way, here's a more close up of the trays with some Zulus to show what the trays look like with figures in them. You can see the white letters aren't perfect, but they are definitely good enough.

Review: Project Paint Station from Army Painter

 So, for Christmas, I got this:

What do I think? Looks good on the box, but not so much in real life. The big issue is in the construction. Being MDF, I was expecting it to use slots and tabs to hold itself together while the glue dries. The only slots and tabs hold the horizontal pieces to the back piece. There are no slots and tabs on any of the vertical pieces. There are grooved areas, which are necessary because no glue will stick nicely to the white melomine surface. 

From the top

I don't recall whether the assembly instructions call for clamps, but they are absolutely necessary because of the lack of slots and tabs. In particular, you need them to hold that piece with the Army Painter label, because you need to bend the piece to fit it into the groove. Not the best experience because I had to assemble it over a couple of nights to allow the glue to dry and I didn't have enough small clamps to do it in one shot.

Tip: They mention a specific glue, but I'm not buying it just for this. I used Carpenter's Glue, but really any PVA-based glue should work fine, as long as it dries clear or white. Don't use Carpenter's Glue though, because it has a yellowish colour that you can see. 

You can see the lack of tabs and slots on the sides. Note the grooves for gluing the pieces together.

Once assembled, it seems solid enough, but I'm definitely not going to deliberately test it because I have no faith it will stick together if I drop it any distance at all.

It will hold dropper bottle style paint pots, but not those Citidel paint pots. Fortunately 90% of my paints are Vallejo or other dropper style paint pots. 

It seems OK, and I will use it, but I'm sure there are sturdier and easier to assemble options.

New Tool: Paint Mixer

Inspired by Luke at Geek Gaming (Youtube link), I thought about my ancient collection of paints. Some of them I've never opened since I got them maybe seven years ago. I'm sure that some of them were many years old before I even acquired them.

One of the problems with these paints is that they require considerable mixing to bring them back to life. This means lots and lots of shaking, and that's hobby time being wasted.

So Luke had bought this vortex mixer, and he was showing how well it worked. I had a few bucks left over so I figured it would be a good idea to get one from Amazon. And here it is:

As it turns out, it's the exact same one as Luke bought. I tried it out and it mixed a paint that had separated into pigment and medium in big splotches. It took a little while but the paint did mix. But doing so saved me about 50% of time and a whole lot of arm shaking. I just press the paint down on the centre and the mixer does the work.

Apparently, there is a danger to using the shaker to long because the vibrations aren't good for you. But I reckon that if I take breaks between mixing spurts, I should be OK.