January 10, 2022: Now I'm 3D Printing (Part 3)

Well, the skeletons came out! All nine of them. My, there are a lot of supports to clip. But they are well designed, and the points where they touch the figure snap off easily at the right place once the rest of the support is clipped away. I can use my fingernail, or sometimes just the "sandpaper" surface of my fingers!

With no failure to clean up after, I was free to try again quickly. So I went back to the skeleton file and mirror-imaged (or "flopped") all the skeletons. That will give me a reverse image of each one to bulk up the army with no obvious duplications.

And it worked! Nine out of nine printed cleanly. So I set up the stretch goal skellies; there are only four of them, so I did the flopped versions of the same plate, along with some spare tentacles that might be fun later. 11 out of 12 builds worked; on one, a support did not appear, and the sword above it was as limp as a piece of pasta. No obvious reason why. So I'll save that skelly as a source of spare limbs or something, and move on.

Printed a bunch of bases next. They print quickly and are easy to pop out. When taking the supports off a skeleton, you need to work carefully with a clipper and think about every cut. With a solid base, you just use your thumbnail to crunch all the supports off. But I did learn not to put them too close together! It's not enough to have the bases separate on the screen – there is a bit of cantilever to allow for.

Now I need to paint a lot in order to catch up with my building. So the painting skills are what needs to improve next. I'll update next time I learn something interesting about the printer. The report now is just "Hey, neat, it works."

-- Steve Jackson