Gorram's Grand Army Project

Failure to prepare is to prepare to fail as they are fond of saying. Knowing that batch painting is going to become a bigger part of my hobby, I need to make a couple of adjustments to give myself fewer hurdles. It might seem silly but one of the first ones I need to fix is my painting handle situations. 

Working on my depression-friendly project Children of the Hydra’s Teeth, I bumped up against an old, very minor issue. For working on 28mm miniatures,I have a Redgrass Games painting handle and have bought extra tops for it. They are very expensive for what they are so I only have five. When I batch paint I tend to work in 10s so it bugs me every time that I don’t own enough. The skeletons I’m painted in batches of six because that is what comes on a sprue and that’s even more annoying because it is just one that was left out. 

I’m still early on in my 3d printing journey but I’ve started to develop the “oh I wonder if I could 3d print one” mentality. Not yet at the “I wonder if I could 3d model that” stage. Thankfully nerds are nerds the world over and someone has already done the hard work for me. 

I’m still working on the best way to set things up for supports (which I also just use the automatically generated ones) so I prepared two options. I tried to put words in here explaining it but my brain can’t so here is a highly technical drawing instead.

As my brain is a broken piece of poop at the moment, instead of printing one of each as a test model, I did a bed of each. Sigh. Don’t be like me, engage brain better.

The first bed was fine. The caps needed a little sanding on the bottom edge but they looked good. The only issue was that the supports to make the underside included one in the hole that the handle goes into. It was a pest to try and get the support out. The caps fit but they are ever so slightly squint. Not in a way that will affect usage but I’m a particular type of fusspot and this is enough to annoy me. 

So the second batch got printed and was better. There was virtually no clean up, no supports in awkward places, though the cap was a little tight but I’m sure that will wear with usage. So I know have 20(plus five spares that are slightly wobbly). 

I paint my smaller scale models while they are glued to tongue depressors and I just grabbed another 60 of those. I guess that removes one major of the barriers to batch painting.