The Union of Scale Model Building, 3D Printing and Art
Completed shortly after USS Helena CL50 and using all the same tricks, my IJN Mogami project was a fun and easy build. Like Helena, it was created using both a Creality Ender 3 Pro filament printer and an LD-002r resin printer.
It was a long time coming but I finally completed my first large, resin only project, using my new Elegoo Saturn 3D printer. Follow the link to USS Tigrone‘s project page for details and lots of print and build pictures.
Update: To see my most ambitious Elegoo Saturn project, check out Charles Martel
Posted:11/3/2020
Because a picture is worth 1000 words, text for this post will be brief!
The ability to easily create accurate, detailed, replacement parts for model kits is something I’ve wanted to be able to do ever since I started work on my Hasegawa USS Missouri.. If you’ve read some of my other LD-002r posts you may have seen me struggle to get consistent results with high detail. Well I finally feel I’ve got a good grasp on what the Creality LD-002r 3D printer can do and how to go about doing it. In short I’m in scale model heaven!
And just for the fun of it, some close up pictures of an old favorite of mine: the US 40mm quad Bofors AA gun mount.
This post was a long time in the making – I’d intended to do multiple posts of the various objects but time got away from me, so here they all are in one big exposé. However, while there may be plenty of LD-002r output pictures, this post is short on “how to” information, you can find quite a bit of that in my Creality LD-002r First Print Examples, Experiences, Fails post.
8/30/2020 I’ve added a new project page for my latest creation using my LD-002r and Ender 3 Pro 3D printers, the USS Helena CL 50.
8/2/2020 Before Yamato and Musashi, Japan’s super-dreadnoughts were: Mutsu and Nagato. Check out Nagato’s project page to view her completed pictures and see what Creality’s Ender 3 Pro and LD-002r 3D printers can do.
5/3/2020 My version of the Worlds Only Surviving WWI Dreadnought USS Texas is complete. Visit her project page to view her updated pictures and see what Creality’s Ender 3 Pro and LD-002r 3D printers can do.
Posted: 7/11/2020
I had recently completed and printed the tower bridges for both my USS Texas and IJN Nagato battleships with my Ender 3 Pro when I ordered my Creality LD-002r printer. While I was quite happy with The Ender’s output I had to print the bridge for USS Texas in multiple figgity parts, clean them up, then carefully assemble them. I was hoping the LD-002r could do a better job and do it in one shot, no assembly required. I was correct!
These are the nicest print examples yet from my LD-002r. The main tower bridge piece took 4.5 hrs to print the stern tower a bit over 4. I auto generated the supports (base only) in Chitubox, deleted some supports that looked destructive to the model, then added some back in as needed.
Not one part of these two prints failed or was stuck to the bottom of the resin vat! I printed both back to back without issue. My only gripe is that, again on the backside of the main tower bridge there was a bit of the slag resin buildup I mentioned in my first LD-002r post. not too bad though as I angled the print so no surfaces were parallel to the build plate (as much as I could) but there is still a muddiness noticeable. The backside detail is definitely not as crisp as the front
The hardest part was pruning the multitude of supports away from some of the more delicate structures without breaking them. Once the majority of the supports were gone, cleaning up the tiny nubs where they had attached to the model was also tricky and time consuming. Still the end product is a vast improvement over the Ender 3 Pro’s output, both in level of detail and time needed for post processing.
I had originally planed to replace the towers on my current USS Texas project with the new LD-002r parts. I now want to totally redesign and construct a new USS Texas from scratch, printing as much detail as possible with the LD-002r and using the finest settings on the Ender 3 Pro for the remaining large hull pieces.
We’ll see…
5/3/2020 And another COVID distraction, the only Japanese capital ship to survive WW2, check out the new project page for IJN Nagato.
5/3/2020 This post introduces my latest project: USS Texas, the worlds only surviving (above water anyway) WWI dreadnought .
4/18/2020 This post introduces my latest completed project, finished around April fools. The 3D printed, WW2 heavy cruiser IJN Aoba.
