Witness the birth of a new monster...the IS-4

[Stormbringer]

I can almost imagine it trundling about the floor

[ColemanCollector]

Holy moley! Work of industrial 3d art!

Sigh...I'm thrilled when I manage a decent benchy...
Miles to go before I sleep.

Mike.

[tankme]

Got a little more work done tonight. The rear deck was screaming for some protective screens on the fans and rear grates. Cut them out of some old window screen I have in the scratch building material box.



I cleaned up the last of the print lines on the front end along with finishing the blending of the front fenders complete with fake bolt details.



I also started to do the weld details on the turret. The weld line will go all the way around the removable roof of the turret. It will help hide the separation and still allow me to remove it to work on the turret insides. Plus it's a weld line that's supposed to actually be there.



Not much progress, but fiddly progress.

That's all for now...

[Stormbringer]

Its the wee details that take the time

[Herr Dr. Professor]

Not just the welding, but the texturing is remarkable. Compare the photos fresh from the printer to these most recent ones. WOW!

[MrChef]

Herr Doc is right tankme you've got quite the knack with improving fidelity.

Nice work sir

[tankme]

Ran into a bit of snag with this build:

When the original sprockets I printed shed a sprocket tooth, I printed another set in PETG hoping that it was the fact the old ones were in a more fragile material. Long story short, the new PETG sprockets have shed teeth and I haven't even put any power to them yet. It's kinda why this build stalled.

I have a plan though:

Since I've been test printing the new KV-1/KV-85 tanks Inkor is releasing, I found that he used the same basic track STLs for the IS-4 and the KV-1. The KV-1 sprockets fit my previously printed IS-4 tracks perfectly. The only difference was that he made the center guide tooth higher and slightly hollow on the KV version track. The KV sprocket teeth are much beefier than the ones in the IS-4 file set. The IS-4 tank was one of his earlier designs and not many have built the tank (that I've seen) and no one has printed a make of it on the Cults 3D website. Technically the KV tracks are narrower than the IS-4 tracks. I'm guessing he decided to forgo redesigning them for the KV to save on CAD time. I haven't gotten a response as to whether or not he will make the KV tracks more narrow, but that's kinda off topic. I'm not a CAD master so I can't just make the teeth stronger in CAD for the IS-4. I can however try to use my Bambu slicer skills to make the teeth wider. I'm going to attempt to slice the sprocket teeth off, widen that section, and then reattach that to the sprocket hub using the slicer tools. It should give me the extra tooth strength I'm looking for while still interfacing with the track correctly. The STL file made from my slicer fu will look strange and might take a few tries to get it right, but in the end I think it will be worth the boost in reliability.

I think I can do it so wish me luck...

[MrChef]

I think I can do it so wish me luck...

Well I definitely wish you luck cuz I can't keep up with this and am just grasping how it all works. My only benefit is I had a good friend who was a machinist and worked in CAD. We were car guys together and he'd explain how things were engineered and produced. He became a salesperson for a machine tooling company for a bit. Then finally got sick of it and became a repair tech for the machines that would produce the parts. Brilliant guy, Just didn't want to deal with people and quota's anymore. He's much happier working with machines. Can't say I blame him.

At any rate keep this up because it's definitely very cool to see what can be done now. I'm still working on mastering styrene sheets, cutting and sanding stuff

[tankme]

Mr. Chef,

I don't mind fashioning things from styrene when needed. I have tons of styrene stuff like angles, rods, tubes, squares, I-beams, and half-rounds in the stash. I do use it quite often as I used some of the half-round to create the weld seams on the beak of the IS-4. Styrene bar was cut to create the spare track mounts on the front and rear.

I really like using the printer for stuff that needs to be perfectly aligned or done in duplicate. I've had an idea to produce a KV-7-2 dual 76mm barrel casemate tank destroyer. The cool thing is that years ago I would have to fabricate most of the detail parts. Today, I can take the detail parts out of the files I've already purchased/downloaded and adapt them to the KV-7 build. Saves so much time and effort. Even if the detail part is attached to something else, the "cut" function of the slicer allows me to slice it off the part I don't need and make it a stand alone part. I can even use the "merge" function to attach it to something else. I originally bought 4mm ABS sheets for the KV-7 project, but with the printer I can actually create the plates in the size I want, create the bevels on the edges, merge the details (periscopes/hatches/etc), and print the completed casemate plates. Then I all I have to do is glue them together. While they are printing I can be assembling other parts or doing the wiring.

I finally pulled the trigger tonight on a new resin printer. Hopefully with that things like machine guns, tanker tools, and other larger resin parts for custom builds will be more accessible to me. My old resin printer just has a lot of failures and has really become more of a frustration than a tool. I want my hobby to be RC tanks and not 3D printing. While 3D printing is still maturing, both resin and filament printers have started to be more about printing your items and less about troubleshooting the printer. You can go the tinkerer route if you like, but personally I just want my printers to print my stuff with little effort. If spending a little more on the hardware accomplishes that goal, then I'll spend a little more to keep my sanity.

I'll post my results of the virtual sprocket surgery. It went better than I could've predicted.

[Herr Dr. Professor]

I do admire those who keep up with 3D printing, and I certainly am not afraid of challenges and learning, but your thinking here, tankme, is a reasonable choice to make: "I want my hobby to be RC tanks and not 3D printing. [...] I just want my printers to print my stuff with little effort."