GMK

Thanks. Not making as much progress as your PzH, though. Haven’t decided whether to install the spall liners that covered the rear windows, yet. Either way, will only be the impression of an interior. Otherwise I’ll never finish it!

Thanks - lots of clean up so far. There’s ten 3D printed parts there, call it ~100 hours of printing, but as it happens in the background, I don’t really count it toward model building time. It’s be like including the time it takes for paint to dry. Design, post-processing, & clean up, though; lots of time there. It’s like creating the kit so that you build the model!

Upper hull skinned & cleaned up. As the roof is the raw print, lots of Surfacer 500 was required to reduce the prominence of the print lines. Added the gun ring base; now to start detail work.

Finally finished the prints of the upper hull, above the chine line. Lots of clean up work to get the upper hull into one piece, sanded, & skinned, but a pretty important milestone, imo. Once the air conditioning duct that runs along the centre of the ceiling is printed, I’ll use that to index the two halves of the upper hull to glue together.

Nice work, @Flankerman ! Thought this pic I took of Albacore at Portsmouth, NH, in February 2019 may be of interest/use.

Back with a little more progress. The right side has been glued together, the support material removed, and the initial clean up commenced.

Well, 18 hours later, this: Resulted in this: Need to remove the support structures & glue the segments together before cleaning up.

Thanks for the kind words, @Bandsaw Steve - having watched your builds since the AE2, I appreciate the feedback. Each half of the top of the hull has a total of three segments, about 44 hours printing in total. Here’s what the slicing software looks like. The file is ‘sliced’ into gcode, gcode essentially the directions to the printer on how to print (speed, flow rate, infill proportion, wall thickness, etc.) the design. The purple is support structures, printed at 15% density, so that openings will maintain their integrity over the ~18 hours of printing. Looks like a Bushmaster. And with the support structure: Seems to be coming together.

Yikes! Sorry to hear about your tooth. What a nightmare! You can get printers a lot cheaper than what I quoted, I just wanted the additional functionality that my particular one offered. The filament I use is $15 per 500 grams, with prints averaging 25-70 grams for the larger prints. “At home” is relative: it’s a process of experimentation and errors.

The Japanese lost a F-35A last year, the pilot did not survive.

Some Bushmasters are fitted with the EOS R-400 remote weapon station, known as the ‘Protected Weapon Station’ when fitted. This is the start of the CAD for the centre section of the PWS. A test print resulted in this (the yellow, resin piece is in 1/35): Need to work on the print quality for more detailed parts, as can be seen here. The styrene sheet background is Wave Corp printed grid.

It’s a bit horses for courses, imo. The overall length of the Bushmaster in 1/16 is about 48 cm/18”, so it’s a big job. My initial plans for this (in 2009!), were to use 2mm-thick styrene. Still have the 2’ long sheets. The size of this monocoque hull exceeded the material strength of the plastic under the original plan. Lots of windows meant that bracing you’d normally use aren’t an option for this particular build. That’s why I’m skinning the parts With sheet styrene - the strength and precision is mostly given by the 3D printed parts, with the smooth surface finish and ease of working will be given by the plastic sheet. The software - Fusion 360 - is free. I downloaded it two months ago, so I’m still learning how to make it work. I’ve been told it’s ‘easy to learn but hard to master’, and I’d agree with that. Lots of other software options available. In normal circumstances, I’m on the road for about half of the year. CAD means I can now model while travelling. Printers vary a lot in price. Mine is a laser cutter, CNC mill, and a printer, but the working space is really too small for my preferred scale of 1/16. Still, there was no change from $800 Australian back in 2018. I used it mainly to print things from free CAD places, like GrabCAD or Thingiverse. Of course, that limited me whatever designs other people had done. I’m looking to upgrade now that I’ve incorporated CAD into the toolbox. HTH.

Thanks, Ray. Larger stowage bins are 10-12 hours, as are the upper hull quarters. The lower hull was 28 hours, with my longest print to date (on a different project) being 52 hours. Factors affecting print duration are % of infill, wall thickness, size, resolution, detail, and quality (fast vs. high quality).

Back with an example of some advantages of rapid prototyping. There are two types of armoured antenna mounts on the Bushmaster, one for the side (four each) & one for the rear (two each). Including dimensioning, these took thirty minutes to draw. Once happy, I conducted a test print for fit & finish. 17 minutes later, this was the result: The recess that I’ll use to centre the AMUs themselves is a bit vague due to limitations of my FDM printer. Still, the dimensions check out and the basics have been confirmed.

More progress, including an update to the lower hull. This lower hull will be used to index & confirm the fit & location suspension components from the Trumpeter M-ATV. The hull is 125mm/~5” long so far. Visible here is the asymmetrical lower hull, with an offset base to encapsulate the drive train. Also visible (barely) is some stringing from me omitting print supports.