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.
Posted: Jan 1, 2021.
Happy New Year everybody!
My WW2 US m26 Pershing heavy tank project is complete!
I’m very happy with the Blender design and my Creality Ender 3 Pro & LD-002r 3D printers did a great job rendering the parts for this project. Assembly and painting went well and tricking her out and weathering her was a blast.
I’m totally remembering why my 15 year old self loved building armor 🙂
Check out the m26 Pershing project page for all details and pictures.
Posted: 12/23/2020
The hard parts are done, now my favorite aspect of model building starts, the finish painting and weathering.
If I ever make this model again I’ll definitely make some design changes. shown is my third turret design and I’m still not 100% happy with it. Also missed a flaring out of the tread covers on the rear insides. The treads and wheels were a pain to assemble and I wasn’t able to pull off functional treads as I had hoped, ended up gluing them all together, oh well, in a larger scale it would have worked!
All in all though, I like the looks of her so far.
Update: 1/1/2021
My m26 Pershing is now complete, visit the new project page for more details and the finished model pictures.
Posted: 12/21/2020
Printing for this project went smoothly, even though the LD-002r bits were printed in my unheated shed with temps in the mid to upper 30s. The turret shown is my 3rd printed – due to poor designs on my part and no fault of the printer. The first just looked too fat and the second one’s rear extension was all wrong. As I mentioned in an earlier post much of the hull assembly is already done so, initial build pictures may be up before Christmas.
Update: 1/1/2021
My m26 Pershing is now complete, visit the new project page for more details and the finished model pictures.
Posted: 12/19/2020
I’ve been working on my M26 Perching design sporadically since I finished the King Tiger. Every time I thought I was done I’d find a picture online that told me I wasn’t. This incarnation, while nowhere near perfect, I feel I can live with. I find designs in armor scales need to be more precise than those of ships. Small errors and intentional design simplifications are hardly noticeable in 1/450 scale but seem glaringly obvious in 1/35.
Most of the parts are now printed. As with my latest ship models I used both my Ender 3 Pro and LD-002r printers on this project. With winter here to stay, I won’t be using the LD-002r again till it warms up. Much to my surprise, I was able to keep on printing with it out in the tool shed, while outside temps were only in the upper 30’s. So if you have a garage (and a sensitive spouse) you’ll probably still be able to print year round – even if you live up north.
Much of the assembly is also complete, so more posts are sure to come.
Update: 1/1/2021
My m26 Pershing is now complete, visit the new project page for more details and the finished model pictures.
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…
