The view from my work bench - 3-D Printing
Posted by Roger Dawson on December 27, 2021, 18:19:55
Those of you who visited the Wellow Mini-ship show will have seen that there were 3-D prints on the Coastlines/Antics stand. The models had been printed in 1/1250 scale at home by my son using equipment and software costing under £1000 total. In my opinion, the quality of the prints was comparable to that of Frosted Ultra Detail models produced by Shapeways a few years ago. The prints that I had with me at Wellow were an airship (Hindenburg LZ129) and lighthouses (Cape Hatteras, Peggy's Cove, Orfordness and Bengtskar). These models were selected so that I could compare the prints with other models in my collection to find the limits of the equipment. You can see the result for Orfordness Lighthouse on Antics website (www.shipmodels.co.uk then search for Orford Ness). The photograph of the red and white lighthouse model is a of a polyurethane casting from a 3-D printed master and the camouflaged model photograph is of a 3-D print in PLA plastic. The beach and the coastguard lookout are polyurethane castings from a master model made by traditional methods in both cases. There are some important points to be made here but I will supply more details to individual email enquiries to roger@coastlinesmodels.co.uk The printer is a filament printer and uses a 1kg roll of PLA plastic costing under £25. Because the Hindenburg model weighs around 25g when scaled down from a larger scale Thingiverse programme available free of charge, they are cheap to produce (as cg1 has said below) but 3.5 hours of printing time, print failures, cost of electricity to melt the filament, equipment breakdowns requiring replacement parts and the capital cost of the equipment all have a significant effect on the true cost of an unpainted model produced in this way. I shall expand on these issues in further posts.
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