I received the prints of the Victorian weapons yesterday. I'm elated and disappointed at the same time. Here are a few pictures with one of my Space: 1889 Brits for comparison.
1 lb. Hochkiss rotary cannon. This one printed the best of all of them. But there were errors in the mesh at the crank so it didn't print. I was using the wrong .stl file viewer to check these before I sent them. The current software I'm using, Mini Magics, marks inverted triangles and bad edges so you can see them and go back into the modelling software to correct them.
3 lb. QF Hochkiss cannon. Again there were issues with the mesh and the aiming trail on the left of the breech didn't print correctly.
Nordenfelt 5-barrel .45 caliber gun. The barrel assembly is so thin that the weight of the material warps the barrels as it is printing. I have it mounted on the naval pedestal here. The original mount for this gun makes the weapon only about mid-thigh height. I'm confused by this because both parts were on the same drawing. and scaled the same.
Nordenfelt top view. You can barely see the rails beside the barrels they are so small.
So... the weapons print at exactly the size I specified. Which is great. I don't have to make any adjustments to the files to account for printing resizing when I send them. I have to go back in and beef up many of the parts. I'll thicken the Nordenfelt barrels and make the external rails a single slab that runs through the assembly. I'm probably going to enlarge the weapons in all directions just to make them look a bit more impressive compared to the figures.
Overall, a fairly inexpensive lesson as lessons go and one step closer to new product.
4 comments:
There's a site at cloud.netfabb.com where you cand send .stl files. It will automatically review them, identify mesh problems and try to fix them. Pretty useful.
For the bent barrel, can you add a support to prevent it from sagging?
Thanks for the tip, Bill. My current viewer marks the errors but doesn't fix them unless you pay for the fixer program.
The barrel issue should be solved when I beef all of them up a bit. So supports shouldn't be needed.
Ok, so that didn't work out so well. My model started with 24 inverted normals. When I downloaded the fixed model from netfabb it had over 3400 inverted normals. What the hell?
I don't know. I've run a few things through the program and never gotten a result like that.
Post a Comment