Blog

This has been a week with a lot of painting, a little casting, and a bit of thinking about future projects. Painting Finished Tank Early in the week, I was able to wrap up my Schrek tank build, which gave me a chance to get some experience in basing. The base seen above was the third iteration, where I finally got the spacing between the dirt piles right. This allowed the tank sat on the base instead of floating above the rocks.

It’s been a pretty productive week, and I got a chance to try out a bunch of new things and get some ideas for future projects a bit outside my norm. Here’s a quick recap of what I’ve been up to this week: Magnets, Painting with Vallejo, and Basing To make my growing Battletech collection a bit more modular (and to keep from making/buying too many minis) I have been toying with the idea of swappable turrets and weapons for my pieces.

Today, we’re going to take a 3d printed tabletop miniature and replicate it with a two part mold. This will speed of production of a part that would normally take two to three hours, and give us the freedom of different materials and colors. Two part molds allow us to cast more complex shapes than a one part, or open-face, mold. This open face creates a flat surface on the piece we are making.

Over Christmas, I took advantage of Google’s sale on the Google Home Mini to pick up a few for the apartment. Even though it doesn’t take up a lot of desk space, I wanted to mount it to the wall to keep it off the limited shelf space, and to hear it throughout the room. To resolve this, I came up with the following wall mount. The design started with a few reference images I found online.

Over the past few years, I have acquired quite a video collection. Hundreds of files have been downloaded or DVDs ripped, resulting in nearly a terabyte of television and movies. I usually use Handbrake to rip files off a DVD, since it has several parameters that can be tweaked to give the ideal video output. I can easily name the file, specify an output format, and even create a queue for getting multiple videos from a disk.

At less than $10, the Tertial lamp from Ikea is my favorite source of workspace illumination. So far, I have one in the garage over my workbench, and one over the desk in my office. They are easy to move into place, and will hold fast when let go. For the price, this lamp can’t be beat. The mechanics of these lamps is also interesting. Forces and torques are balanced through the weight of the lamp and counter-acting springs.

In collaboration with my university’s anthropology department, I had the opportunity to scan skeleton fragments with the intent to 3d print copies. Yesterday, I finally got a sample scanned and printed. I placed the skull fragment on the rotating platform of a NextEngine 3d scanner, giving a full 360 degree view of the object. I did this twice at different orientations, and used the scanner software to fuse the scans together.

Though I received it weeks ago, I finally got a chance to install the x-axis upgrade for my Printrbot. I now have 4 more inches in the x direction, and a heated build plate. I also installed a new Ubis13 hotend to replace the offbrand E3DV6 that leaked all over the place. This required printing a new fan mount, which you can see coming off the hotend in the picture. I’m looking forward to printing with new materials and making use of the extra space.

A little over a year ago, our group acquired this old ZCorp 310 printer from surplus. This machine uses powderbed technology, where an inkjet deposits liquid binder on a plaster material, fusing it together into a solid object. This brand of printer is rarely seen nowadays, since the company is now owned by 3D Systems. With no material, no accessories, and no software, we were unsure if it was even functional.