First, I didn’t account for the light bars that run between the side panels and had to add those later. You’ll see later in the process that this is where I made my main mistakes. The panels all fit with some trimming and an unhealthy amount of superglue. Better to start with the best possible bits and use some elbow grease to bring it together than trying to spend eternity fixing up a lousy starting point. Remember what I said about cutting your designs up so you could print at the best orientation for your detail? I made a selection of separate panels so each could be printed flat for the sharpest details and decided I’d worry about how they fit the interior surface afterwards. Then it was on to interior panels! I ground down the entire inside of the cockpit ring with a rotary tool and made new panels to act as a replacement skin. These served two purposes- they provided the correct contour to the nose face, and they covered a ton of surface that I didn’t want to putty and sand! The conical canopy pieces had been printed with the nose as the bottom surface which meant the ugliest printed surfaces were the front face of the finished kit. Or just keep pumping out crap on Etsy that makes people wary of 3D printed kits I guess.įirst new part was a set of caps for the nose. It takes a little more work upfront to make your pieces smarter, but it saves so much time in finishing and results in a much better product. It’s so easy to cut your designs up into more parts that can be printed on their best facing and fit together afterwards but 3D modelers just slap all the details on one big chunk and slam it out the printer, detail or surface finish be damned. I see this all the time with 3D printed products and don’t get it. The kit had some detail designed into the interior surfaces to represent all the consoles and switches and greeblies of the cockpit, but they were printed integral to the cockpit body so none of the details were printed in their optimal orientation. Going forward in the pictures, anything in yellow or black plastic was designed by me and printed in ABS.Īfter an initial pass at sanding the exterior and the first coat of primer, I decided the interior surfaces needed a complete overhaul. I quickly decided anything I could re-draw and print myself in ABS would be the quicker option because then I could acetone-smooth the parts and use my normal glues and techniques. It’s just so difficult to putty and sand due to the hardness of the plastic.
It’s always covered in nozzle strings, but that’s just as much an issue of the printer and operator than the material. It might be easier to print on cheaper printers than ABS, but every PLA I’ve worked with is hard, brittle, and miserable to work with. Let’s take a second to talk about PLA plastic. I got to dry-fitting to see what I was dealing with.
The basic gist was there, but there was plenty of room for punch up. When I opened the box I knew I was going to want to do a lot of work to this kit to make it the best display piece possible. Click below for a walk through of the build process, the additional 3D printed parts that I made, and the painting process! Cut to eight months later and I’d completed the longest and largest project I’ve undertaken since the printed Warlord Titan (which I’ve apparently never posted on here?). The kit is huge and features some key interior elements, but I found the overall detail and finish of the kit left room for improvement. I was asked by a friend to build and paint a 3D printed kit of the Millennium Falcon cockpit for 6″ Star Wars Black figures he had purchased.
0 kommentar(er)
