My journey into 3D printing, a second time

If any of you have seen or followed my old blog, of which I rarely do anything on nowadays, back in 2014 I had a few posts of excitement over accruing a 3D printer. It was purely intended for my hobby, with the intent of mostly making terrain and some other useful things. I had some plans for some simple minis, but knew I wasn't going to get any real good detail out of it.

That experience was a disaster. I constantly tinkered on it, multiple calibrations, etc. What started at first as an exciting foray into a potentially cool venture, turned into a disappointing discouraging experience. I got maybe one decent print out of all of it and a lot of failures. With a little bit of anger, I decided to cut my losses and sell the printer a few months after I got it.

That was back in 2014, and I decided to retry it a month ago. After much research, mostly on YouTube and various other review sites I got some encouragement. I had looked into a lot of models, but finally decided on the Creality Ender 3, and the big reason was because of this video.

So I got mine, and with a little assembly, I had it running and giving me a near perfect first print. I was ecstatic. So for the last month or so I have been running this thing constantly, with little to no issues and very few failed prints. This is like a dream.

So a couple things, I did a lot of research. I watched hours of videos, mostly on using and maintaining a 3D printer. I recognize now several things I did wrong back in 2014 with that printer, and I could have probably gotten it working with what I know now. But the other big factor is it has been 4 years, and the technology only got cheaper and better. Newer printers, even the chinese ones, are much better than those old machines. And that printer back then was about $800 when I got it, and this Ender 3 cost me about $240 on Amazon.

So on to some prints, shall we?

I designed this using a simple online 3D design program called Tinkercad. I consider it the MSPaint of 3D modeling software, which is perfect for me, and it's good enough for my use. I found a rock pile file on Thingiverse.com, which is a great repository for free models for printing. Definitely a recommend resource for anyone wanting to get into 3D printing. So I found the rock pile, and using Tinkercad I cut in the recesses and added the 2 little dice trays. The big dice I can use for tracking the turn in 40k, the big bowl I mainly used for command points which I track with beads, the small dice I can use for victory points, or even tracking the turns in AoS. Whatever, I want really. It's a useful command tray for holding whatever I need in games. And it fits in my game tools bag, along with the dice, tape measure, etc.

Here it is painted up. I tried to go for a similar paint style that GW uses on their Warscryer Citadel, I really like that Azyrite meteor look, but after it was all done, it just looks like a stained wood, which works good too. I finished it off with a couple coats of a spray on gloss coat to give it some toughness.

I recently got the Castle Panic board game from a friend. Wonderful game, a great time for any boardgamer. Then I thought I would add some 3D printing flair to it:

I went ahead and printed a wizard tower for use as I plan on picking that expansion up anyway.

Now that is not all I have been printing. I also printed a couple toys for my girls, some parts for the printer itself, and Jarom had me commission him some preliminary parts for some projects he has planned. I have a couple more posts coming with cool stuff I have made.