I have some HAT Austrians that I intend to paint at some point (some are currently painted as British, French and Dutch!) so I thought I'd tried printing a 54mm Austrian Cavalryman as a test.
Still needs some cleaning up but looks pretty good.
The cavalryman took 2 hours to print, the horse 5 hours. I have a load of spare painted 54mm Napoleonic horses in the loft that I am not using, so I'll see if he will fit on one of those which might be easier to produce a unit.
I have now printed 4 54mm figures using my 3d printer and this is the latest of them after tweaking a number of settings.
The figures are Russian Napoleonic Infantry designed for 28mm and resin printing rather than the FDM printer I have.
The figure is scaled to 175% size and I have tweaked settings to thicken the walls of the figure, etc which means that the thinner scabbards now cast properly and don't break off.
I am pretty happy with this one and think I should be able to print off a unit to experiment with painting.
I have been asked about printers and settings so technical info follows:
The printer is a Cubicon Style which I bought in 2016 as it had an enclosed case (which made printing ABS easier and I wanted to use it to print components to turn into metal in vulcanised moulds) and it had an auto-leveling plate.
The settings for the figure above are:
0.4mm nozzle
ABS
0.2 layer height
supports are everywhere with an angle of 65 degrees, 10% fill and a grid pattern (I find that these are the easiest to remove.)
There is no raft beneath the print.
Wall thickness is 6, top and bottom are 3
I have been watching the growing list of 3d printable Napoleonic figures with interest. They are mostly available for 28mm with a very few people offering them printed in 54mm, but at that size they cost £5+ for a single figure.
I have an FDM printer (which I've had for 8 years) and have started playing around with a new version of the software and some 28mm Napoleonic Russian stl files to see what can be achieved.
The files supplied are really designed for resin printing but I have managed to work out how to create files that will print on an FDM printer.
This is a quick photo of my first effort.
On the left is a HAT Austrian line infantry man and on the right is a
3d printed Russian Fusilier officer. He could do with some more
cleaning up on the supports but I think he had come out quite well.
He is printed at 175% size of the 28mm original figure and comes out about the right size for matching with HAT.
If
I can get some consistent results this would mean I could add a small
Russian and Austrian contingent to my 1/32 Napoleonics collection at
some point in the future.
