Haze Gray

Floyd, have you had successful trials with PLA welding? when I tried it I got very inconsistent (bad) results but I may have been spinning up to high - When you lined up the railing, how big is the difference in the deck height? If you can line up the deck and the hull and the keel acceptably and only have the railing to fix, that would be the way I would go. It's going to be easier to add material/filler and build up a flush surface on the railing than it would be to shave/remove material. The plastic will hate you from trying to remove more than 1mm of material and it will remind you that the skin is thin, especially in section 5. We could always hang tires over the side too to help hide seam lines Another alternative is to line up the keel and the hull and the railing acceptably and if you only have the deck that's out of alignment then a sheet of wood or other material + filler could be used to bring the main deck up to match.

LOL I was trying to keep a low profile -! I actually went through 4 iterations of the hull if you can imagine getting 12-20 hours into something and going "nope, not gonna work". I'm including pictures showing versions 1,3, & 4 - version 1 was some experimentation I did when it looked like all we would have to go on was 7 photos of low quality - version 2 had only a few partial frames to work with and no general arrangements - gleefully deleted cause I hated it so much which is why I can't show it - Version 3 we had gotten just maybe not quite enough and I had to leverage some schematics of a similar tug to get there. - Version 4 was completed using about 20% of Version 3 and about 60 photos from an on-site visit of the tug which turned out to be critical in completing the design The promise of 3D printing boats (or anything else) are perfect parts, that fit together perfectly, perform and look perfect. - Unfortunately there are multiple realities (some of them good, quite a few of them bad) when you actually attempt it because the printing part is experience, skill, and science driven - but I don't think that's different than any construction technique - I remember building a FW 190 out of balsa from a Gillows kit in highschool - glued it all together perfectly but the balsa was green and when it dried overnight the fuselage was bent like a banana - totally unusable. For me - I'm all in on 3d printing - probably because I can do all the design work, planning, and integration of elements which is a very pleasing part (and I do okay with the printing quality!)

Hi Ben, The way it works is actually only 1 magnet (neodymium) down at the bottom of the hollow column (basically a pipe), the base of the water cannon has a step in that narrows down the end to fit into the column but at end of it is a steel screw - steel screw contacts and is held in place by the 5mm magnet - two magnets might work but the steel screw is adjustable ensuring proper contact.

Hi Ben, I contributed to the project a bit - the school wanted certain features and one of them was for the nozzles/water cannons to rotate - and the thought is the magnets would allow for the 360° rotation while also being easy to replace should they get snapped off by enthusiastic students. There's a couple of other components that were made to allow for removal and replacement (pretty much anything that was going to be actuated or manipulated by hand).

So I ended up ordering a Folger FT5 printer kit (basically an H-Bot type printer) I am definitely going to need more printers but I want to try out building a kit to see what I want to change and at the same time I'm intrigued by the H-bot style where the build plate only moves down and the print head moves in the X/Y planes. I really need about 5 -6 printers but not sure if I have the space in man-cave for them. Also, will need to spend some time on constructing the mikasa in Fusion 360- that was a fun excursion and visit on that ship! I have more than enough data on the boat (actually I have photos and data on about 250 ships at this time and 2TB+ of photos plans!)

Yes, interesting isn't it? Would absolutely be ideal for smaller detail parts, infact...I suspect you print 100 railing posts at the same time just as fast as printing 1....there's no time penalty to printing multiple parts as it prints any layer of all parts at the same time not one after another..... 1L is about 1kg, so if $70/L it's easily twice as expensive as typical filament for your average fused filament 3d printer.

I'm in the market for another printer (it would cut the printing element of my development time by 50%! which would be a BIG improvement) and you would think that already having one printer would make it easy for me to choose what my 2nd one would be but all I have is an ever expanding list of wanted features! I'm suddenly interested in the DLP and SLA as they have some great resolution (anycubic photon DLP is ~$500!) but the limited size and resin fumes and need for post wash and cure is troublesome. The typical FDM/FFF is still a nice solid bit of technology that's easy to use and affordable but has some inherent limitations. If only there was some SLS printers in the 250mm cubed range wth 0.05mm layer height that were affordable, that would really open up possibilities.

Very much Appreciated the invite and wish I could have stayed longer. Will certainly come whenever I can, Good bunch of fellows you have there! Will have to touch base with you when I get back in Seattle next week!

Off on vacation this week but will post a few pictures of the hull of the Maine when I get back, the name plate on the stern of the boat did print out and didn’t look bad at all. So, vacationing in japan, not too far from Yokosuka where the (pre-dreadnaught) Mikasa sits, had to stop by, pretty interesting, couple photos of that ship....

Good morning, another photo and getting closer- last section will be done this evening. I’m also going to start experimenting with printing at 1/96 scale which could be a good compromise between size and presentation.

Whups wrong thread- deleted!

Okay, I just had to give this name plate a try - 2 hours later..... it has the similarity of features but obviously not what I would call close... will be fun to see how much of it comes out in printing. one of those things that would be way easier and much better if just done by hand !!! (and Yes I need to adjust those ports for the stern lines but that's easy) Also hull in the photo is 80% printed, working on last two sections!

I’m using 3mm filament and a 0.4mm nozzle, most of the sections I do at .14 layer height but a few are at .20 layer height.

A couple more photos that I was able to take this a.m. keep in in mind that while the prints you see on the photos are good, they are not super great or anything... iPhone camera is designed to make anything look good! theres a few sections in the hull that have different settings, I find pretty much that increasing layer height means taking a hit in print quality but I haven’t quantified exactly why that is. I think it has something to do with thermal expansion of the material at higher flows.

Okay had a bit less time than I was anticipating this weekend, bunch of kids sleep over for a birthday - but did manage to get a few more sections attached. Also test fitted turrets but no photo of that yet. ts but no picture yet