3d Printing and a new toy

 I have been thinking for a while about upgrading my 3d printer.  I bought the Cubicon Style 9 years ago when I wanted to design and print Toy Soldier terrain and vehicle parts in ABS plastic so I could mould them in metal.

The Cubicon was expensive  but worked straight out of the box which meant I could spend time learning the software, rather than rebuilding the printer every time.

Technology has moved on and I have been keeping an eye on Bambu printers as a possible replacement as they have a good reputation and are a lot faster than the Cubicon.

I noticed a couple of weeks ago that Bambu had a sale on so picked up the Bambu A1 printer for about 20% of what I originally paid for the Cubicon.

The printer is easy to put together (just 10 screws or so to attach the two halves, plus some cables to plug in).

One of the reasons for wanting to upgrade the printer was that I was finding the 150mm cubic bed of the cubicon limiting on what I could print.  There is a lot of very good 3d printable terrain pieces now and I needed a larger printer to be able to print them - the A1 has a 256mm cubic bed.

In particular I have been looking at getting some French houses, etc for my WW2 setup and this enabled me to buy the 3dprintterrain WW2 buildings which I really liked the look of.  For £58 you get a huge number of very well designed buildings - I bought the 80th anniversary Normandy set.

The buildings print much faster than on my other printer - typically 4-5 hours for the main building and 2 hours for the roofs.  I am printing them at 0.2mm quality in Matte grey PLA which gives a good effect and minimises the print lines.

I have started painting them and am pleased with the results so far,

I want to make a number of town/village bases for WW2 games so I can play through the Blitzkreig scenarios in the Rapid Fire scenario book which require a fair number of buildings.  Most of the WW2 building I have are ruins rather than complete buildings.

I am also looking at printing some bits and pieces for my Gangster city (such as water towers for the roof tops and a train carriage to go with the existing train and tender) and some starship corridors and rooms for Star Trek skirmish games.

More progress on Dendermonde

 

Finally finished texturing and painting the main elements of the Dendermonde defenses.  Still need to finish off the Gatehouse but getting there.

Next up is working out exactly how I am going to do the grass on the Glacis and designing and cutting the causeway from the gate to the glacis via the demi-lune.

Very rough setup to see how it looks...

 

 

Mortimer's Cross with Flower of Chivalry

 

Another Wednesday, another game.  This time we played a refight of Mortimer's Cross during the War of the Roses using the Flower of Chivalry Rules from the Canadian Wargames Group.

Setup was a 4' x 4' table with the Yorkist deploying first along the old Roman road and the Lancastrians deploying on the ridge on the other side of Mortimer's Cross.

The game was very enjoyable and we both remembered how much we like these rules and what a good and realistic WOTR game they give.

The game was very close, with the Lancastrians (me) just breaking the Yorkist morale and taking Mortimer's Cross with 3 of my own Army morale remaining.

28mm figures based on 60mm square bases.

 

 

Defence of the Ypres-Comine Canals 1940

 

Played a 20mm Rapid Fire game at the club last week.

I used the excellent Blitzkrieg scenario and forces books and ran the defence of the Ypres-Comine canal scenario.  It has 3 battalions of germans with supports attacking 2.5 battalions of British who are heavily outnumbered.  Its a nice scenario to use as an intro as it has only infantry + support weapons and off table artillery, no tanks involved.

The British were eventually over-run, with the Seaforth highlanders falling back before routing, the Fusiliers also routed leaving a weak 2nd Northumberland to try and defend the canal.  Some good german artillery made short work of them and the game was over - pretty much an historical result.

The British artillery was quite poor (my die rolling as usual) and I didn't manage to make as much use of my MG teams as I hoped.

Great game and the other two players who hadn't used Rapid Fire reloaded were impressed by the ease of the rules.

Some swapping and some painting...

 

 

When I bought my Minifigs SYW collection it came with a load of unpainted figures included (or should have done - took 2 months to get them from the seller). They turned out to be mostly Old Glory FIW figures so they are going off to Colonel Bills for credit and in exchange I am getting 2 units of WOTR men at arms and 2 units of Scurrers to round out my WOTR forces.

This continues trying to keep my hobby cost neutral.

 

I have also been slowly working through some stuff on the workbench.

Finished texturing all the Dendermonde defences and managed to undercoat most of them - when it stops raining the rest will be done and then I'll start the dry-brushing...

I have arranged a Rapid Fire Reloaded game at the club tomorrow with my 20mm collection based on a scenario in the Blitzkreig book.  I am having to sub in some figures (mostly MG34s for MMGs and 2pdrs for 25pdrs) - I have got a ton of unpainted and part painted SHQ and some EWM figures so it has prompted me to dig out some stuff to paint:

2 x Quads and 25pdrs and crew

3 x Boyes AT teams

4 x Vickers MMG and crews

I will probably also order some proper MMGs for the early war germans (I am using paratrooper ones at the moment) and some early AT rifles to replace the Airfix panzerfauste figures!

I also need more CO figures for HQ sections - so need to look at Raventhope of someone, I think.

I was actually running the game to encourage me to think about getting my French WW2 army that I bought from Eric Knowles estate rebased and sorted (including the colonial elements)...

 

First SYW games

 Played two games with my new Minifigs 25mm SYW collection last week.

The first game was at the club on Monday night with one complete newbie and 3 of us who hadn't played Honours of War that much.  There was a fair amount of rules flcking but we didn't get anything wrong..

I took the Prussians alongside Ian and Norman and Justin took the Austrians.

The game went badly from the start with an independent Austrian Hussar unit making a double move to hit my Prussians in column who failed to change formation.  I rolled badly in the melee and the unit routed... How embarrassing...

I recovered but an hour or so later I managed to roll three 1s in a row in a series of cavalry melees, lost almost all my cavalry and we decided to call it a day and concede to the Austrians.


The second game was smaller, in my games room and against my regular opponent Anthony.
This time I took the Austrians and Anthony took the Prussians.

It was a close fought game and we both came to needing to break one unit to break the opposing army.  I managed some lucky shots with 2 artillery batteries on one of his cavalry units and victory went to the Austrians again...

The Guildford club have made some small modifications to Honours of War to use D6 throughout and reduce the effectiveness of artillery and some shooting.

I think they work very well as a set of SYW rules.

Tissues and glue....

 I have started the long process of texturing and painting the Dendermonde walls.  The techinique is to coat the structure with a thinned coat of PVA glue and then to apply a single ply of tissue paper to it.

 

 

Then you paint another layer of PVA over the top.  This produces a textured surface that can be sprayed grey and then dry brushed to highlight and bring out the texture.

I use cheap "Saxon" 2-ply tissues from Aldi which are large and easily separate.

The end result when dry is this:

City walls are done and most of the Ravelins.  Next up are 2 Demilunes and then the 3 Bastions.  I need to cut some window and door frames for the city gate before I can texture that and also need to tile the roof.

The effect once painted is shown on the sample ravelin here: