A What If Amphibious Vehicle

[Robomog]

True chameleon armour.  Interested to see this in solid to form

Nice one !

Mog
>^-.-^<

[PFJN]

Hi,
I finally got a chance to start trying to 3D print my model.  I had a little trouble initially since I am using a new printer and a new slicer program, so it took me a while to figure out some of the settings and such, and I had a few mess ups along the way.  In the image below you can see the main body of the waterjets, the road wheels, suspension arms, drive sprokets, final drives, gun barrel(s), gratings, and a messed up print of the turret.

Now that I think I have a better handle on the printer and the settings that I should be using I'm working to clean up the model of the turret and hope to reprint it soon.  Its also been a little trail and error figuring out how small I can print some stuff, and I've had to go back and revise the model of some parts to make them a little more sturdy.  If you look closely at one of the gratings you can see a small chip in it that I need to fix.

Anyway, I will probably start posting the rest of this build on the physical models sub-board, since this group build is now over, but I wanted to show a pic of how things are coming out.

Regards

Pat

[Kerick]

That’s all amazing to me as I haven’t a clue how to do that! Keep it up! I’m waiting to see more.

[Old Wombat]

Woh! That turret looks like someone/thing hacked into it with a HUGE axe!

[PFJN]

Hi,
My second attempt at printing the turret came out alot better. 



Pat

[PFJN]

Hi,

I've gotten most of the small detail parts printed now, and am almost ready to start on the bigger parts.  I decided to print alot of the derail parts separately since it makes it easier to clean them up and it also allowed me to play around a little with settings to see what worked best.




Overall I found if I made the parts about 2cm thick full scale (which scales out to about 0.57mm model scale) things came out ok, though for some parts I found that I could potentially go a bit thinner, though the parts became very fragile.

In the picture below you can see two different attempts to print the 50 calibre machine gun.  In the top part of the image I tried to use too small of supports, and the part separated from them during printing and got all messed up.  In the bottom part of the image you can see a much nicer print out, that I got just by changing to medium sized supports for the print. (sorry that the image is a little fuzzy). 



And finally, here is the forward seakeeping flap, printed in three pieces.  I wasn't able to make the holes in the hinge parts print properly but I hope to try and drill out at least the outer parts to see if I can fit a wire in to allow the flap to fold and unfold.



Next I just have to print out the return rollers, and tracks before trying to tackle the main hull 

Pat