Patrick Matthews

Can anyone point me towards accepted info on Constitution's 24 pounders? I've read that the 1906 and 1930 restorations both resulted in the "wrong" guns being recreated for her, and the most (all?) of the current 24 pounders are from the 1930 restoration. But do we know what the "right" guns may have been? I'm hoping to find dimensional info to help in constructing a larger scale gun model. I searched here, but the number of hits are overwhelming while not shining light on this question...

And it doesn't all have to be printed. The house above is wood and styrene, with printed details. My 1:8 R/C DUKW axles work better with some brass parts: Printed wheels, rubber tires from a printed mold: Brass tubes because the printed ones I made before actually sagged ("crept") under load:

And sometimes we print parts for things that float! Railings- sometimes there's more resin in supports than the parts: Many of the parts needed for this inland rivers towboat:

p.s.: As a white guy, I feel I can take any liberties when painting a Caucasian... but somehow I feel- uneasy? - trying do a creditable Black soldier (who by the way were operating many of the DUKWs, with for example the 476th Amphibian Truck Co at Iwo Jima). And it seems that available skin tone paints just don't go here. This paint is too "chocolate" imho... darned if I know how to fix it.

It sure is hard to pin down the correct shades to use for faded and well-worn US uniforms, but here are my choices for my 1:8 GI DUKW driver and leatherneck hitchhiker. I'm no figure painter, and I want to make more improvements on the faces and eyes in particular... but I still have to finish building the rest of the DUKW! - Dressed and posed in DAZ; - Messy stl's cleaned up at GamePrint; - More clean-up in Blender; - Hollowed in Fusion360; - 9" figures printed on an EPAX E10 - Mostly Lifecolor paints.

Yes, the crossings in the "field" are easy... it's all those splices at the perimeter that give me heartburn. I'd hate to just tie knots, but it might be that or nothing!

I'm well along in building my 1:8 (yes, 1:8) scale DUKW. I'd dearly love to have a cargo net for it's load. I'm guessing these things are about 8 or maybe 10 foot square with 4 foot long corner eyes, and about 18 runs of small rope spliced to a larger perimeter rope... perhaps 1.5 and 3.0 mm respectively in scale. OK fine, I can make or purchase the scale rope. But some 88 splices in scale??!? I don't relish that idea. Any alternate ideas?

I merely posed an available figure from Daz... not my sculpting work. Amazing stuff though!

More of the DUKW driver: Daz file cleaned up and made printable by Game Print. Bad gaps all filled in with no serious loss of detail. Pics show the figure fresh off the printer and post-cure, no fettling yet. But depending on the skill of the digital sculptor, some amazing detail can be included, as evidenced by the lacing, cuffs, collars, face. Of course a lot of this would be lost in smaller scales... this big boy is 1:8. BTW, I didn't bother buying the hair package! But he'll be wearing a helmet anyway.

BTW, here is the first driver print, with flaws that aren't too obvious here- mostly the faceting and the shredded collar. Second and better one is on the printer now. 2 oz. glue bottle for scale.

Yes, this not merely a leaky STL. It's several layers of self-intersecting surface meshes (not close to a solid) wrapped around the watertight figure mesh. It would require a huge amount of manual editing in Blender or Meshmixer. The idea of "shrink wrap" is appealing, but even that is very limited in Blender.

OK, I tried 3D Builder. Was pleased at first- it worked! But upon closer examination, the "fixed" model was still loaded with issues. Maybe because I'm working in a very large scale, so it tried to leave details like his trouser pockets and gaps under his collar and a number of other issues. I went ahead and printed it. Mostly OK, but some very visible areas lost detail or fell apart in printing. I poked around and found another way: https://integralrealitylabs.com/gameprint These folks want to print (and paint!) high end game figures for you. But you can also use their plug-in for Daz to merely upload and clean a downloadable STL, for the princely sum of $2! I tried it and was much happier with the result. All gaps filled, all thin sections beefed up. Two gripes though: 1. They insist on resizing the STL as a standard (to them) figure size, like 6 or 12 inch, thus losing the original size. You'll have to rescale to your own needs. 2. The mesh is heavy- many many triangles. Mine was 430 MB. If it's a problem, the mesh can be decimated in Blender. This will be my workflow, until something better comes along. I'm amazed that a powerful application like Blender doesn't have such a feature. My new fixed driver:

Forget Hero Forge, see elsewhere here about Daz (and probably others). I was able to get a WW2 army uniform for a figure, pose him, and he's now on my printer. Big guy, for my 1:8 scale DUKW.

Same process used here on my "business card", a one-piece print:

In Fusion 360 (and probably other packages), create a single path for the centerline of your rope. For multiple lines in a block, do just one loop and copy the solid segment rather than doing the entire length. But with your path, create a single sketch with all the strands. Overlap them a bit and cut away the interior overlaps. Then sweep that sketch along the path, adding twist. In F360, I have to specify the entire twist amount for the entire length, might be a few thousand degrees. Here's a printable wire spool for my 1:8 DUKW winch. One loop of wire: The printed wire reel:

Nice find, I'm trying it out now for a big 1:8 scale driver I need for my DUKW. And yes I see that much repair is needed for the STL. Not only removing bits that are too small to print (like shoe laces), but also filling gaps under the layers of clothes. I have to look if any of the mesh programs have a "shrink wrap" function, like I had in some high end software at my previous employer. Does what it sounds like, covering a messy mesh with a new mesh that bridges holes and gaps under a set size. That would make life easier! I also need to find out how to import a CAD seat and steering wheel to Daz, that I can then use to position the figure correctly... a learning curve! Cross section through the STL reveals gaps that would cause print problems:

I like any of the "hard/tough" resins for just about all parts I make. And yes, a thick wall, 2 - 3mm, provides a lot of strength without building excessive internal stress. There are ways around that issue too if needed... plastics can be "tempered", but I haven't needed to resort to that. 1:96 railings: That's a tough one for printing. I did some in 1:87, with 1/32" printed stanchions and brass wire rails. Those stanchions were really delicate and I was terrified of breaking them simply by threading the wires through. They really want to be metal.

And let's not forget another thing you can do- print metal parts! Actually, you have a service print waxes for investment casting, and they outsource the parts to a casting house. You can also print your own waxes at home, but have to deal with the casting process yourself. Here's a 3 inch Federal-Mogul "weedless" prop for that same DUKW, cast in bronze:

Another use for printing: Rubber tires, as shown above. There are some flexible black resins, but they are difficult to work with and produce a material more like vinyl. Instead, I printed a mold for the 5 inch OD tires, and had a friend pour polyurethane rubber into it.

Accurate? More accurate than anything we whittle in wood! Smooth? As with wood, allow all surfaces to be sanded or scraped smooth. Molded plastic parts from Tamiya are smooth, but those steel dies have been laboriously polished to achieve the smoothness. Someone is going to do the work somewhere. For precision parts, I treat printed parts like metal castings... which need to be machined for precision work. Here's a 1:8 scale DUKW axle printed in pieces on a little Photon Mono. Parts were machined for fit and for bearings, and glued together. Works fine.

Multijet printing at Shapeways has just gotten more and more expensive, to the point I avoid it now in favor of my home resin printers. Never did an entire hull in it, would be thousands of dollars, and in many pieces, because the platform isn't so big. I did do a 27" hull in one piece on a big industrial (true) SLA machine, but that was through a special relationship that no longer exists...

Phil- re: the white crud... it's a totally different process, with resin droplets being spritzed (like from an inkjet printer head) onto a wax support base. When done, the wax is (mostly) washed away, leaving a free part with no supports. But all surfaces that were in contact with the wax look frosted, while the top side is clean and smooth. Illustration depicts the wax support (red) under one of my chain-stopper sprues.

You're a brave man, Doctor. I've done that small a chain with Shapeways, as their Multijet process uses wax supports, not the integral supports we're forced to use on home printers. Sadly, the Shapeways process proved to be too difficult for them to control. They even told me that they used my chain as a test for their machine prophylaxis! But they couldn't keep it up consistently, so the chain usually arrived fused. I've never seriously considered trying it with integral supports- too much nipping and clipping of brittle supports on delicate parts, and I wanted to have a commercial go at it. The smallest chain below is the same size as yours... so congrats on making it happen! BTW, I was able to print chain in lengths of about a meter at Shapeways. I was limited by the number of links, or actually the number of STL file facets, for which Shapeways had an arbitrary limit in order to control file sizes. I was getting down to optimizing the number of facets in each link! The macro image shows the odd wax and/or unexplained crystal gunk that is found on these multijet parts.

As discussed above, the hinges from Dumas and Micromark are a good bit bigger than what what we're searching for. Thanks, PM

In another post on rotary tools here, I mention that I'm a free-range modeler. Unlike a dentist or a jeweler working in one tightly defined area, I need my rotary tool all around my 8 foot workbench... flex shaft tools and even cords don't cut it! So I'd be lost without my cordless Dremel. And lost I was for a few days, as my 15 year old Dremel 800 just died. So I rationalized why it was worth it to pop for Dremel's new top of the line model, the 8260-- it's an oft-used tool, and I use it more than my nice airbrush which cost about the same amount... so there. Just received it today, and- uh oh. It's a beast. It's huge. It has great features- a 12v Lithium battery and a brushless motor- good stuff! But it's huge. I mean, look at the thing. My old 800 fit in my hand nicely, and even with its funky looking battery, it was well balanced. This thing is fatter and clunky to hold, and it's HEAVY. 21 ounces vs. 14 for the old 800. It's longer, and has that silly end cap at the business end to get in the way of everything. Luckily, the svelte cap from my defunct 800 can be swapped in. But its bulk will likely cause issues getting into tight areas. The Dremel literature shows this thing chopping off rebar, I'm sure it could. I looked into other cordless offerings, and they're either discontinued or just too wimpy for my needs. The 800 was just right. I even looked at Proxxon... their cordless unit is even heavier! No thanks. So now I'm rationalizing why I should keep the new 8260 instead of returning it. New 8260 on left, the dead 800 on the right. Yes, the Dremel name lights up. And it even has Bluetooth so you can use your smart phone to check on the battery charge (whaaat??) My 800 was always right there ready to use, anywhere on this huge bench.