Project VIII/17

[edit] Yeah, I know this postset is coming out almost a year after I had this one done, I just didn't want to intermix these with the T-35 posts, in case I ran out of stuff to say before I had time to work on something more reliably again. 2018 is, has been and will be a bit of a weird year for the 'Mumblings

Hello from the 'labs

I had heard of (and seen) a couple of months before my first workday, that my new workplace had a few 3d printers. My first idea was obviously Nemesis the Warlock's Blitzspear but I just couldn't find a model of it. Well, someone sold a file for 80 USD but that was a bit too much for a silly test. And I really had no skill nor experience with any 3d modeling software. From a different universe - Farscape - Moya and Talyn did raise lots of interest but then I somehow remembered my often-repeated complaints about how there have never been TIE Bombers as scale model kits...

From plans to action

I consulted a colleague of mine who played more in these circles and on a half-rainy early-autumny Thursday afternoon we went and pressed the "print" button. The slicer thought after a bit of rotating, setting up and setting-adjusting that it'd eat half a day.

This was what a single extruder would take, the moarxtruder that had still been installed a week before would've been noticeably faster (with worse resolution) but what can you do? As the quality settings we opted for the normal ones, not the fast or the best details presets. Because of the funny shapes the Bomber also required a check in the "all supports" checkbox and of those we went for the volcano-like shape of supports, as the model itself had such a tiny footprint.

There was a handy webcam view where we could check if the damn thing even started working. Oh yes, it did, oh yes.

Hurmh.. About three hours later there were still over 12 hours of printing time left.

A four-hour checkpoint

On my way home I popped by the office to check how it was progressing. Slowly. Luckily I (nor anyone else) didn't need to stay to oversee the process.

The Friday morning experience

As usual, I was pretty early at the office. This time I didn't start by making coffee but went to check the webcam feed from my 'puter - for nothing. The device claimed to be done, the temperatures were down and because the room itself was dark, the image feed was pretty much useless. So I ran to the printer, again passing by the coffee machine rapidly and unnaturally.

I may have made a bwahahahaaa-like sound when I found my print. It was both larger than I had expected and also lighter than what it looked like. Cleaning up all that support framework did sound unfun, though.