Embracing Tomorrow

3D printing has slowly been building in popularity in the wargames community as the technology has become easier to use and cheaper over the last few years. The power to produce your own miniatures or terrain has seduced many to dip their toes into what essentially a whole new hobby.

This last week I had a rush of blood to the head (and wallet) and joined the ranks of the 3D printing community. As we already have a resin printer in the family I opted to get a filament printer instead, these are more suited to  making terrain or other large pieces rather than the finer prints produced by resin printers. The printer I opted for is the well regarded Bambu Lab A1 which happened to be on sale and was delivered the next day after ordering on a Sunday. The only small issue was the filament itself which came via a separate delivery a couple of days later. This gave me ample time to put the printer together, a process which took around 45 minutes and was extremely straight forwards.

With it working by heating up a long string of plastic the A1 doesn't have the toxic materials associated with resin printing, but you still want the window open whilst the print jobs are going on.

The reviews I read all pointed out how the A1 was pretty much a plug and play printer with the software working out everything for you so the first things I printed where a tray to catch the waste filament (grey tray on the left of the printer) and then some rocks for our desert campaign.

I left the rocks on the default height setting which lead to some noticeable layering on the top which I've covered with some sand effect paste. If I wanted I could have gone back and reprinted them with a lower layer height, this just adds time onto the print job as it builds the piece up. But as it's unlikely you will be spending much time studying the rock formations (unless the battle is going very badly) I doubt I will. You don't need to do any prep before painting so I stuck them on a base and hit them with the various yellows I've been using so far.

Whilst waiting for the filament I'd also picked up some designs for dirt road sections so I printed out one of the straight sections so see how that looked. This section (and the rocks) needed resizing and again this was very simple to perform in the printer software. 

Now I know this works ok I'll need to print out a load more to create a proper road network. The files include a little clip to join the sections together so they don't get easily knocked apart.

One feature of the A1 bundle I purchased (and it's software) was the ability to load multiple filament spools onto it's holder system and then swap between them as the layers go down. Whilst waiting I also picked up some files for terrain designed to fit in the 3" cubes of a Deadzone / Halo table and thought I'd give this feature a try as well. With the way the filament layers go down it's much better to have a horizontal line of colour than a vertical one as it only has one nozzle and needs to extrude waste filament between changing colours. 

I did have one failure during the print process but fortunately it was almost complete so I still had a useable item. The A1 comes with a built in camera so you can watch (and cancel/pause) your printing from your PC or smartphone. Very handy for keeping an eye on things.

It also come with built in layer settings, with the standard layer height (on the left below) being 0.20mm. You can go down to 0.12mm (on the right) and even 0.08mm, and up to 0.28mm for the fastest and roughest prints.

As things had been going so well I thought I'd throw something hard at it and grabbed a free Stuka file which I scaled up and used the auto-angle and auto-supports buttons to let the software work it all out and then hit print. Five hours later I had a perfectly respectable Stuka to put out on the table to be blown up by the SAS.

All in all I've been very impressed with how easy this has all been. I have more roads to print off and another Stuka or two and then I want to start thinking about a special project to work towards. I've had in my mind for a while a Stalingrad game based on the Deadzone rules, the issue has always been getting the terrain, until now that is.