Want to buy a 3D printer

[mudgnome]

Hi all, I’m looking to get into 3D printing….for 1/6 vehicles….any recommendations would be great..

thank you.

[Ecam]

I am too new at 3D to make a recommendation. I did take the advice of one of the members here and bought a Creality printer. Nice unit and was easy to set up and get running. While being taught by my son in law, I used his Prusa printer. He had about 10 units between work and home and reduced down to one each (home/work). It was an impressive machine, but the cost was high. His machine had six spools and the machine could self change between the six resins.

[Panzer Fenris]

1/6 is pretty massive. Borderline for what I'd want to attempt with a consumer-grade 3D printer.
Your mileage is of course going to vary by what vehicle you're trying to recreate however. Something like a Jagdpanzer 38t is going to be quite doable, but any large tank is going to take an awfully lot of splicing up the parts to make them fit on the printer and gluing them back together, and then massively reinforcing them afterwards to handle the torque and weight it will be subjected to.

It is possible, I know a guy working on a printed IS-7 at that scale, but it is not what I'd recommend for a first-timer.

If that did not dissuade you from trying, I would advice you to look here for recommendations.
https://all3dp.com/1/best-3d-printer-for-beginners/

[tankme]

1/6th scale tank on a last gen slow cheap 3D printer will take you forever to print. Even on a printer like my Bambu Lab X1C ($1600), it will take a long time. I'm printing a 1/10 Jagdtiger and some of it's parts are taking 10 hours to print on the Bambu. That equals about 30 hours on like an Ender 3 and that is just 1/6th of the lower hull on a 1/10th tank. Typically my printer is about 3 times faster than an Ender 3 out of the box. Personally I wouldn't print any tank in PLA, but some have as parts in PLA tend to warp. PLA is cheap, but if it warps in the sun your effort is for nothing. Personally I would use PETG. I've been trying to use ASA on large parts and I'm getting nothing but warped parts even with my enclosed printer. Trying to print a 1/6th scale tank as you are learning to 3D print is a tall order. I've printed over 2000 hours of stuff on my FDM printers and I still get failures. I would estimate my 1/10th project will eat 3-5KG of filament. A build plate of 14 track pads for the 1/10th Jag took 2.5-3.5 hours to print depending on which type of pad being printed and I need to print 216 of them. That's over 45 hours of print time just for the tracks on a very fast, expensive printer. A 1/6th scale tank will be more like 10-15KG of filament depending on the model of tank. I mean if you print an FT17 it will be much less. You print a T90, it's going to be a lot. There are a lot of variables.

[AlwynTurner]

Hi, I like your enthusiasm for 3d printing, but am concerned that as a 3d printing newbie you are going to be on a very steep learning curve with 1/6 scale models. I would suggest that you cut your teeth as it were on a couple of 1/16 scale models before progressing to 1/6 scale. If you are going to design your own models then you will need to first become familiar with a design tool like Openscad (my preferred tool) or tinkercad, there are a number of free design tools knocking around. If you scale up 1/16 model designs to 1/6 scale you are going to experience problems as your wall thickness will scale up making your models very heavy and requiring days to print parts rather than hours and use a very large amount of filament. There are ways around this if you are doing your own designs, as you can print a skeleton frame for some parts and clad it with styrene, see this Lloyds carrier thread as an example
viewtopic.php?t=27178
As regards a printer, to get a reasonably priced printer I would suggest a Creality Ender 3 max as it gives a fairly large build plate at 300mm widex300mm longx290mm high, and if you are printing anything bigger than this, start calculating your print times in days if not weeks! The Ender 3 Max NEO is currently selling at £339 on special here
https://store.creality.com/uk/products/ ... gkQAvD_BwE
but if you shop around you may get it cheaper. The nice thing about Creality printers is their reliability (I have 2, an ender 3 max and a cr-10 which I have had for years) and the ready availability of upgrades and spares plus a good set of youtube tutorials if you hit any problems.

Good luck with you quest and please pm me if you have any specific queries.

Alwyn

[mudgnome]

Thank you all for the info….funny a 38T was mentioned….that’s what I would want do if I ever get into this.
More reading required……Thanks

[tankme]

The Warprints 38T needs at least a 350mm x 350mm bed. That is above average in size. Other option is you can buy a smaller printer and learn to cut your own files to a size that will fit your printer.

[ColemanCollector]

Fascinating and valuable discussion on something I've been thinking about purchasing in the near future. The Creality Ender 3 Max gets a lot of votes on various sites and the price is right. Realistically, is it capable of printing a 1/16 tank from a file service for a noob like me, or is it more of a smaller components and servo-mounts type of printer?
Time for a steep learning curve challenge!
Thanks,
Mike.

[AlwynTurner]

Hi Mike, typically the files for 1/16 tanks are made up of a series of components that you print separately and glue together. If a file is for a complete tank then don't go near it! The files available vary in quality and complexity but they generally are suitable for a 3d printing newbies. Getting started can be a little challenging as the printers generally come only partially assembled, but there are lots of youtube videos for the crelity series on how to set up and tune a printer. Also there are a number of members on the forum who can usually assist in resolving problems. I'll pm you to give you some info.

Alwyn

[Kaczor]

Take into account that as the dimension increases, the volume increases to the square, so a 1/6 detail will print at least 9 times longer than a 1/16 detail.