Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, and Tamrielo
Hey Folks! We are down a Thalen this week but continue chipping away at our massive backlog of discussion topics after taking two weeks off due to holiday and illness. We start off with some talk about Dwarven Realms Season 5 and how it allows you to get all the loot without gating your access. From there, we talk about Star Citizen and how it has mostly kept all of its promises during the 2025 release schedule. Most of us have been playing Guild Wars Reforged, and we talk a bit about how much better the game looks and what we are playing. Grace discusses a Vampire Survivors like that has building sim functionality in the very long-named Monsters Are Coming! Rock & Road. Bel has ventured forth into the realm of FDM printing and talks about various lessons learned. Lastly, a quick topic as Bel shares that the POE2 bear is really good, but so is the recently shadow-dropped Paladin in Diablo 4.
Good Morning Folks! I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving break if you celebrated it. I had a decent enough day but it pretty much wore me out completely. I am still fighting some illness and I have a doctors visit scheduled for in the morning where I am hoping going to get some help. I feel like I have something akin to “walking” pneumonia because I can function well enough… but just have zero stamina and devolve into coughing fits on the regular. We did not record AggroChat yesterday in part due to we were down a bunch of folks, but on my side… because I did not really feel like pushing it. Suffice to say that Friday when I set up my brand new 3D Printer… it took multiple passes before I had the stamina to get everything done. In truth I had done 90% of the things in a single pass, and had I ONLY dealt with the printer I would have probably been fine. However before hand I set up my last of my shelving units, and routine the power cord for the printer over the top of the door leading into the house from the garage. So by the time I actually got around to unpacking the unit I was already running low on juice.
I partook of one of the recent deals through Bambu Labs where I got their P1S printer, the AMS 1.0, and a couple of partial spools of filament for roughly $500. I realize that the P1S has recently been replaced by the P2S, and the AMS has also recently been replaced by a newer AMS 2.0 model. However I figured this was a good set up to get me started in my adventures in FDM printing. Truth be told I had been researching different printers for the better part of the last year, and this setup appeared to be the least painful and was as close as you could get to a truly out of the box turnkey experience. Truth be told other than a few hiccups where connectors popped off during assembly, and a single jam feeding filament with the AMS, it has been a pretty flawless experience. I would absolutely recommend this setup for anyone wanting to dabble in such nonsense.
As is fortold by the printer gods… the first print is required to be a Benchy. It also ships with the printer on the SD Card and was readily available. By around 2pm on Friday afternoon I had printed it out and for the most part everything seemed to be working just fine. This was with the default settings and long before I had dabbled in installing Bambu Studio or tweaking any of the parameters. My second print was a scraper, which honestly I am not sure if I am actually going to use because I am not too keen on metal blades on my textured printing plate. Instead after a bit of research I picked up some plastic razor blades which arrived yesterday and are seemingly going to work beautifully without leaving any scratches. I am well and truly knee deep in the eternal scope creep of hobbies, and I have a cooking torch on its way arriving today so I can burn away stringing when it happens.
The third print was a model designed by Miscast that is part of his permadeath vlog series. The models he has been releasing as part of this series are specifically designed to be a bit chunky so that you can print them without much issue on an FDM printer. For most miniature scale printing you really need resin printers, which is a thing that I am planning on getting into at some point but figured FDM was the better starting place. I attempted to use some of the auto settings in Bambu Studios, and was the first time That I actually laid parts out myself on the plate… and lets just say… it is also the model that made me realize I was going to need to start tweaking some of the settings. This is absolutely usable, especially when you consider that it is largely designed to be a base for kit-bashing… which is going to require a lot of post processing anyways.
So what did I do? Jump into my most ambitious print yet of course. This represents a plate of legally distinct Not-Space-Marine Not-Space-Wolf chapter base toppers. I cranked up the quality as best I could and let these stew for 14 hours, as effectively the last thing that I printed on Saturday. While they need some cleanup, and removing some support material that I had to add to deal with some of the floating aspects of a few of the designs, I think they are absolutely serviceable for the purpose of miniature bases. I printed off 25 of these in total, and for the most part I am pretty happy with them. Again I will absolutely spend a bit of time fiddling with them and smoothing out a few spots where there are textures that I did not want but they should paint up just fine when an official GW Space Marine is standing on top of them.
The first print of the day on Sunday was a set of filament clips, because I had ordered some specific colors of filament for the next big project. After doing a bunch of research I landed on this design which seems to work beautifully. Essentially I needed to eject the lime green and neon orange filament that the unit came with, so that I could load up new spool of SunLu Matte Green, and SunLu Matte Red high speed PLA. I put the other green and orange in baggies and put dessicant sachets in there as well, which is a thing that I am going to need to start saving from pill bottles. In theory you need to keep your Filament as dry as possible, and while we do not really struggle with high levels of humidity that often, apparently once it goes bad it stays bad and there is not much you can do to save it. There is a whole system that you can print out to put in the AMS 1.0 to solve this problem, which I will spend some time doing at some point.
The next project is something that I had seen somewhere along the way either on Instagram or Facebook or something of the sort. Essentially someone had the idea of making a “Lego” Christmas Wreath, and within a few minutes of searching I found several sources. I largely wanted the most simplistic design that only used the “leaves” and the 1 unit caps as berries. First off I have to say how much I love the fact that this printer has a camera. Sure I wish it transmitted at a reasonable framerate… but just having some ability to check in on your print is phenomenal, especially since I am usually upstairs in my office and the unit is humming away on a workbench out in the garage. My sibling Ace has been living vicariously through me and I have been flooding their messages with lots of progress shots as we went along.
The leaves came out beautifully and each one of them took about an hour and a half to print at the ttweaked settings that I had finally landed upon. I am not sure how much is the settings that I tweaked and how much is the fact that I swapped filament, but so far I really like the Sunlu stuff. I got it purposefully since I had heard lots of good things from folks about it specifically, and so far I agree with their assessment. It is cheap enough at $14 per 1kg spool, and in printing off six of these I barely made a dent in the spool as a whole. It took around and hour and a half for each leaf to print, and then some additional time to let the plate cool down to around 35c so I could remove it without fear of anything warping. Over the course of the day I printed all six leaves required to make the wreath and then set up a plate full of the 1x caps in Red filament to churn away while I slept.
When I got up and around this morning, I dry fit everything together and this is the result. I am not 100% sure if I like the arrangement of the caps yet, but I am pretty happy with the end product. There was some stringing down inside the red caps but it isn’t noticeable at all since they are going to get seated down on top of the leaves. I’ve heard that Plastruct works beatifully as a solvent glue to weld together PLA and I am contemplating a trip down to a local hobby shop to see if they have any over lunch. I would probably try it first with the Miscast limo to glue it up and make sure it did not destroy everything in the process, before touching this effectively final and perfect print. I could always use CA/Super glue, but I have always preferred “welding” plastic together when an option, and would love to find a viable solution for that with the ubiquitous nature of PLA.
Today however I need to sort out a better system for poop management. Essentially each time the unit clears the extruder head or switches filament color… it poops out a little bit of material down a chute in the machine that leads to it just sort of spilling out randomly onto my workbench. There are dozens of different systems that people have devised, but I am going with effectively a pretty straight forward bin that just sits up against the back of the machine to catch things as they drop out. I am holding onto this for the moment because if Plastruct works… I might try and create some sort of equivalent of “sprue glue” with it for smoothing out rough surfaces similar to how you can use it for gap filling styrene models. These remnants will also be great for testing with just to see how it works. However I did have the funny idea that if you had enough of these, they would probably make a great replacement for packing peanuts.
That was my weekend and my first steps into the 3D Printing world. Expect to see more of this nonsense in the coming weeks, and at some point I fully expect to get into resin printing as well.
