3D Printing

I know, I had meant for this to be a post about the Descendants trilogy from Disney, but like I mentioned last weekend, my husband got a new toy - 3D printer.  It's actually pretty neat and eventually, I'll do a post using his permission to post pics of some of the completed pieces and possibly of the printer in work and the different stages of work that have gone in to what's been printed - mostly figurines.  We plan to paint them as well, so there's that.

Trust me, if you get a 3D printer it won't be easy going.  You'll have to figure out what you can do based on the dimensions of your printer and if your printer works on the metric system or not.  You'll have to figure out how to set things to print for various set-ups.  Supports are needed for parts that "hang" such as archery bows or claws.  We've tried making a set of dice three or four times now, and only just figured out the supports and other bits that go into it - all my husband's doing, of course.  Before you even get to this point you have to decide either resin or filament.  We went with resin so if you decide to use a filament printer, what I'm about to mention likely won't matter much.

When it comes to resin printers, you have to decide on the base resin.  There are a rather large number of colors and durabilities to them.  We've decided to use a rather durable gray for most things with a slightly more durable transparent blue for dice at the very minimum.  Then we had to find everything necessary for a curing station set-up.  I won't get too much into that.  Suffice to say, it was neither cheap nor easy to find everything we needed and we started at Walmart and finished with orders on Amazon.

After we finally got the bulk of things figured out in regards to the actual printing, we looked into painting them.  We haven't started on that yet, but we went to Michaels yesterday to get some base supplies that will be used.  We researched and found that most apparently used an airbrush.  Neither my husband nor I wish to use one.  We've decided to hand paint.  So we bought some spray paint primer and finish for before and after painting the figurines and a 36 count box of Craftsman paints and a small box of hair paintbrushes (at the moment I can't remember what type of hair they were) to get us started.  We will likely get most of our supplies there.

If you do decide to get into 3D printing, be aware to start with a large figure.  Work your way down to learn the system and its idiosyncrasies.  We got advice from a co-worker who went through 3 bottles of resin because he started with the smaller figurines.  We only went through 2 and started by printing a tarrasque.  Our printer can't put it at its full size for the D&D mat, but we already printed off a figure and it's pretty decent.  Having figured out what our printer can handle, we've decided on some back-up ideas for the figures that we are likely to need for our campaigns.  Hopefully next weekend we'll have actually started to paint the figurines we've printed off!

Time Gets Away

Okay, so between my last post and this one, time has gotten away from me.  I am sorry.  It wasn't done on purpose, I promise.  I know a new year has started and we're already on the first weekend of February, but honestly, I just allowed things to get away from me.  There were a rather large number of holiday parties and we had car issues and our home furnace go out within only a couple of days of each other with the following weekend culminating in our oven's bottom coils no longer heating up.  The stove portion works just fine though.

Now, my husband has gotten a 3-D printer and as I type this he is delving into the rabbit hole of 3D printing designs so he can hopefully figure things out so we might actually cosplay at the 2020 Gateway Comic-Con.  What would we go as?  I haven't a clue so far, and we have so many other things to take care of that it's not exactly a priority at the moment.

Seeing as this is the first post of February 2020 (the first post of 2020, period) I guess I ought to give out the month's plan.  Obviously, this is the February 2nd post.  For next Sunday I hope to get a post about the Descendants trilogy and its musical numbers.  I know, it may not seem a big deal, but I have my thoughts on the musical numbers within that trilogy and the release of those pieces that I've been wanting to give.  Since my husband isn't into them at the moment (he doesn't even know what they are!) I figured this was the best option for getting my thoughts on them out there and perhaps getting some feedback about them!  Anyway, after that maybe I can do a Valentine's-based post since Valentine's Day is on a Friday?  Then for the last post of the year - the first Charmed episode rewatching (hopefully and finally!)

At least that's my hope for this month.  I cannot guarantee anything since there are innumerable other things that are going on and taking me away from my writing, but I promise I'm trying!  So until next week hopefully you had fun over the holidays and aren't swamped with things going wrong!