Tuesday, July 29, 2025

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.


7 comments:

  1. Very nice buildings with sort of character that fits with Rapid Fire. After 9 years the technology advance must be very telling.

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    1. The changes are mostly speed and the ability to recover from a filament problem and keep on printing. Being able to send prints by wifi from one room to another is handy.

      This printer is open so is smellier and slightly noisier than the Cubicon, so it is in my hobby room where I can leave some windows open and it is out of the way.

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  2. The BambyLab A1 is on sale in Norway too, and I'm really considering to get one. Now it's close to my FlashForge Adventurer 3 in price. I really like the bigger build plater being faster and it seems like the print-quality is pretty good too. It's not enclosed so I don't know how this will have influence on big 3D prints?

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    Replies
    1. It seems fine with bigger prints in PLA. You need to keep it out of direct drafts but otherwise it seems fine.

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  3. These are printed to 0.2mm, not 0.02mm?

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