RC Tank Warfare community hobby forum

Well after realising that the turret rotation hole needed to be further back, and that this would mean it went beyond the back wall of the upper hull section, I rejigged the whole thing. The turret is now 100% of the scanned size, and everything is as close as I can get it to the dodgy blueprint that I am working from.

So, endless hours of printing ahead....

Front slope 10 hours.
Mid Section 14 hours.
Rear Section 22 hours.

Phew! Had a weird panic moment when I went to print the rear, the printer skipped the initialisation, moved the bed forward and tried starting to print off the back of the bed. I ended up having to delete the STL file, go back to Openscad, re-render the object, re-create the STL, re-load it into Cura, and re-create the Gcode file. No idea what was going on there, but for a few minutes I worried that something had blown on the CR-10 board. It all worked ok after that though.

So, I woke up this morning and there is the rear deck all done. I have loosely placed the hull on the KV1 lower that I have and it seems that the dimensions are good to go...thank goodness. The only major part to print is the turret, and that is another 22 hours of printing. I have half a spool of filament, so will weigh that and see if I can squeeze the turret out of it. If not, I have more filament on the way.

Glued and gaps filled. Totally solid now.

Mr Wibbly I am beyond impressed with this beauty. Such an incredible and inspiring build I am following along with great interest

Having taught myself how to design parts like this, so that the deck vents and other detail is printed as one solid object makes things rather easier. Very little glue involved, and it means that everything is aligned perfectly. The new reels of filament should arrive in a day or two, so I will be able to print the turret, which is a 24h print job. It will then start to look like a tank. I should really order another lower hull from RCTank.de as I can't use the Project 704 lower that you see in the pics, I had to modify that one.

I did a bit or research on smoothing printed parts, and it seems that polyurethane wood floor sealant is the stuff to use. It's thick stuff, and self levelling, so brush it on and leave it to dry. The hull is pretty smooth but I need to get that Russian uneven surface, and this technique may do that. I have stippled Vallejo Varnish on with previous models, and that works so the polyurethane should do the trick and will be a lot cheaper.

Checking in Mr Wobbly............
Just a thought, once the varnish is set, try stippling on Tamiya putty and acrylic thinners over the top to get your desired surface effect.

Love it by the way

I went to the local DIY place yesterday and searched the tins, the damned print was so small that I will have to return with my glasses so that I can see what is in them. Vallejo do a bottle of polyurethane, so I may end up with that.

Spent the day printing some side bins, took three attempts, they are only 1mm thick and taper down at the edges, which caused them them to keep lifting off the bed. I did it in the end though. The back panel is also done, and that was three attempts as well, it seems that designing the part sloped on screen causes all sorts of problems when transferring it into Cura, try as I might I could not get a smooth surface on it no matter how I rotated it.

Tomorrow I will start the turret printing, which will take 24 hours to do...

Remember these Russian machines are lumpy and bumpy at best so a bit of Mr surfacer and some patience and all will be perfect

Awww shucks, thanks for the compliments. It's purely because I have too much time on my hands, and I have always had an addiction to increasing my knowledge of anything. The daft thing is that Openscad is the only CAD program that I have been able to master, I have a few on my pc but they all seemed too much like hard work to get to grips with.

The turret has been printing for many hours and it looks like it will be a nice solid print, with 2mm walls. The very last part of the print will be the top hatches, and they are the part that I am guessing will be too thin. It will be fairly easy to solve that issue though.

...and 23 hours later...one JS3 turret. It needs some more cleaning up, but many thanks to Tim for doing the conversion of the render. As I suspected there are some small holes around the hatch area, but nothing like as bad as imagined they could be. I'll reprint the hatches seperately and replace the ones in the turret. The outside surface will get a coat of filler to smooth over the polygonal rendering, and give it that rough cast look, which will cover a multitude of sins.