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[DamienB]

Tilting is about reducing surface area on each layer and therefore the force needed to peel off the exposure plate, and move through the liquid resin. Nothing 'drips off' during the process itself, as it's all happening within the liquid medium. Whether it drips off at the end is irrelevant as I run it through a cleaning solution of IPA to clean any uncured resin off.

[DamienB]

Aft hangar block external view, with life raft shelves glued on. One genius aspect of this UV curing resin is you can use it as glue - just apply a thin layer to the surface and point a UV flashlight at it. It hardens incredibly quickly and forms a really solid bond. Far, far better than superglue. There are various details missing from the hangar at this point - approach lights, landing aids, a big cabinet on the aft bulkhead - all to come later.
If you look very closely you can see the fine stepped lines on the angled surface of the life raft shelves. As these will be obscured by the liferafts once fitted I'm not bothered about sanding them smooth. The side of the hangar has more widely spaced lines, which I have made some effort to sand off.


This is the area of superstructure forward of the actual hangar. Annoyingly, this was too big to print it one go too so I split it in two (you can see the join line along the top near the ladder). The obvious choice here for build plate surface was the roof itself, which avoids any shelves collecting resin elsewhere. So I cut off the little bit sticking up and printed that separately too. Also you'll see an open ventilator hatch, I seperated that out before printing as it otherwise gets cut in two by the roof line.


Another view, showing some reinforcement walls to keep things stiff. In the end I don't think these were actually necessary and were I to print this block again I'd try without them.

Printed item, primed and glued to the aft section. I've clipped off the reinforcement bits to save weight.

Some assorted gubbins for the upper hangar deck. Lockers, cabinets etc. plus the blast shield and control kit for the Corvus chaff launchers.


Took two attempts to print the Corvus shields, as they needed more of a floor to work properly, but they came out OK second time. Rough placement of various bits to see how far I'd got - this was actually taken before the 'glued together' shot earlier in this post hence the missing life raft shelves.

[derekwarner]

Have been following on Damien.......there is absolutely no reason why 3D printing can be used for larger structures, I just never considered this aspect


So based upon CAD and correct input, the accuracy of scale detail output is astonishingly sharp & clear 


Derek

[DamienB]

I'm so impressed by the printer output. I've found myself designing bolts that are sticking out 0.2mm from a surface, then kicking myself for wasting time, then printing it and finding you can see them!

[RST]

How do you find the fumes and clean-up. I' m itching to take advantage of discounts and get a printer / curer and clean-up combo, but there is no way I can deal with quantities of IPA -will need to be the water based resin.  Where do you keep your clean-up solution so the light gets to it to cure washed off resin? I'm struggling with that concept also but your work is really tempting.

[DamienB]

The Mars Pro I use was smelly first time I used it but not since (it has a gasket round the cover, and a filter on the fan). For cleaning, I initially used IPA and a toothbrush and then a little turntable and a UV lamp to post-cure. Messy, time consuming. Chucked a hundred quid at the Elegoo Wash & Cure machine. Fill the bucket with IPA, a few buttons presses - print is basically clean. Remove item from build plate, remove supports, dab any remaining IPA dry, put back in machine, press a few buttons - cured. Game changer - so much less hassle. Every now and again the IPA needs to be sat in a window sill to cure out the suspended resin bits (or use the cure cycle in the wash & cure machine!), then pour it through a coffee filter to clear it up a bit more and re-use.
The water washable resin suffers from cracking, and while you are using water for cleanup, you can't pour that water down the drain as it still contains resin which is bad for the environment, you still can't handle it with bare hands, so basically the only plus is you don't have to chuck £30 a year or so at buying IPA. I don't particularly mind the smell of IPA, and the container is only open briefly so health hazards low. I use blue nitrile gloves for all handling of the build plate and item up to curing stage, if you're careful you can reuse them several times before they get sticky.

[RST]

Thanks for your reply. Kind of confirms what I was thinking with resin printing. Great prints but too much clean-up and disposal I can deal with (also I'm in a flat and have enough modelling incendiaries stored as is). I hadn't found much feedback on the water based resin so that's good to know. I have more than enough PPE but the clean-up is prohibitive, I'll have to stick with my current printers.  Thanks for posting back.

[DamienB]

Modelling incendiaries 
Right, light relief time. Funny I always think doing a small bit will be less work than the big chunks. They never are.



Mk.32 Shipborne Torpedo Weapon System (STWS) or the triple torpedo tube as the Septics call it. Great bit of bolt-on kit dating from 1960 with a rotating mount and 3 torpedoes ejected by a compressed air system (the hemispherical end) after the end cap (left) hinges up out of the way. The derrick to the right is used for loading torpedoes into the tubes.On later ships these were removed to make space and weight capacity for other equipment such as more guns - the ship retained torpedo capability via the Ship's Flight Lynx.

STWS fresh from washing after printing. If you look closely you'll see a flat disc under each one - this is where the mounting failed to print correctly.


After post cure and removal of supports. I ended up making separate parts for the mountings as they didn't print correctly for some reason. Look at that detail - I didn't think the wiring on the junction box would come out for instance!

[warspite]

Why 4 ?


Would it not have been easier to split it up into 'Airfix / Matchbox' sub assemblies ?


Otherwise brilliant 

[DamienB]

For a lot of the smaller items I'm printing multiple copies purely so I have spares in case of minor failures, or trying different orientations for comparison. I'm just being lazy trying to model things to be the minimum number of parts. Almost everything being the same colour grey helps :)

[DamienB]

Now, going back to the central superstructure. Again on comparison with scale plans, something was seriously out. It looks like the entire section is too long, with the errors spread over several places. The lack of detail and the cross passageway made the decision to rebuild the section under the funnel easy enough. However, choosing the orientation to print it was trickier - flat deck is the obvious build plate area, but makes the part too wide to print in one go. Also too long, of course. So this part is actually split into 4 bits for printing.


Resulting bits, glued together, and placed on top of the existing model structure to demonstrate how far out the woodwork is. The big empty space gives me more room to possibly put a smoke generator in the funnel... hmmm....   Any recommendations for an inexpensive non-polluting smokey thing?



So, the funnel. As I mentioned earlier I had a quite nice funnel replacement already. Big chunky bit of resin - 90 grams of it. Dimensionally pretty accurate but a little lacking in detail perhaps. And it had two big rectangular depressions on top that aren't there on photos of early type 42s. So, sod it, designed that too As I've been doing with other bits, I'm going with ladders and railings embedded on the surface rather than being separate items. This is because it'll save me time and fiddling, and hopefully be more robust when it comes to handling the model.



Completed funnel test fit - spot on. The holes in the side of the funnel are for later use to put in some aerial spreader poles, resin wouldn't be strong enough for those so I'll use brass rod. I have used resin for the bracing to the side of the main mast as you can see on the far right - that's under no load so while it's still delicate I might get away with it, or I might replace with brass too. The completed funnel is 64 grams, so a nice little weight saving on the Sirmar item too. This is a wide angle shot so the forward side of the funnel is distorted looking - it does correctly slope back a bit in reality.

[poshcarl]

Hi, just seen your 3D prints. Have you thought about making them for other modellers.

Carl

[DamienB]

I think if anybody is desperately after any of these bits, get in touch, but I've not planned on selling them. Doubt there's enough interest out there to warrant the hassle?

[DamienB]

Back to fiddly bits...
8 barrelled Corvus chaff rocket launcher. Another "xxxxx" to design as I couldn't find any decent drawings and online info contradicts actual photos. Best I could manage anyway. Illumination rocket launcher on top. Chaff rockets are used to throw a bundle of basically metal foil into the air to decoy away missiles (such as the infamous Exocet). A type 42 had 16 ready to go, supposedly enough to decoy away 4 attacks before reloads were necessary... but they didn't carry many reloads


I designed this to include the deck wiring conduits, but they didn't print well; I also designed it so that the illumination rocket launcher was printed seperately so I could support it easier. A mistake in retrospect as they were a massive pain to clean up without breaking them!

Next, the pelorus stand on the hangar roof - part of the emergency conning position. There's a lot of gubbins on the hangar roof, it's going to take a while to figure it all out.



Then I started chopping wood. At this point I was still planning on just giving the superstructure a new bridge and making do with the rest of it...

[DamienB]

My model's Sea Dart launcher, hiding under a thick layer of paint, looked to be a bit basic so I'm replacing that too. Another tricky one to design as there are so many different shapes! This is the 42's main armament - the GWS 30 Sea Dart launcher. Pictured in the loading position with the arms slewed to the vertical position and a single drill missile loaded. I've designed it in bits so it'll be able to be posed in different positions. Something entirely missing from the existing resin launcher was the loading arm on the port side. A delicate bit in 1/96 but it printed OK.

For a 1960s design this was a fearsome bit of kit, with a rocket booster getting the missile airborne and up to speed for the kerosene-fuelled ramjet to take over and accelerate it up to mach 2.5+ and hit targets up to 30 miles away and at altitudes of up to 82,000 ft. However, it was expected to be used in the open ocean, not close in to land, and in the Falklands conflict the associated radar kit was badly hampered by ground returns, resulting in several failures to lock - thus contributing to the loss of HMS Coventry. On the flip side, as the Argentines also had a pair of type 42s, they knew that flying at high altitude anywhere near a type 42 was pretty much suicidal, so they chose to stay at extreme low level, costing them a lot of fuel and restricting their time over the islands.



Next up, the Vickers Mk.8 4.5" gun. More tricky shapes. My model already has a pretty decent resin gun (Sirmar I think) but in for a penny and all that. This will be printed in 4 bits - barrel, main body, the short ladder section attached to the underside and the base itself, so that the gun turret will be able to rotate.

[DamienB]

The 4.5 printed out pretty well, though I got a repeat of the issue of resin piling up underneath the flat base. As it's out of sight, I'm not going to revisit to fix this.



Now, the Oerlikon 20mm cannon. Two of these, mounted either side just aft of the bridge. Of WW2 vintage and absolutely "xxxxx" all use if you're trying to hit a fast moving jet. These are aimed entirely by eye, moved manually by the gunner and reloaded manually too by swapping out the big magazine drum on top. Falklands experience led to more modern cannons being mounted, and type 42s eventually ended up with the far more lethal Phalanx CIWS. I've thickened up a lot of details on this in the hope it will print OK while still looking vaguely accurate. We'll see!



...this little printer continues to impress, I didn't hold out much hope for some of the finer detail on this (e.g. the handles on the magazine and the gunsight), but it's all there.

[DamienB]

This took a few days! Westland Lynx HAS.2. Coventry's main anti-submarine and anti-ship weapon, able to carry torpedoes, magnetic anomaly detector, nuclear depth charges, Sea Sku air to surface missiles (first combat use was by Coventry's Lynx in 1982) and - in a fit of improvisation involving an office chair base - a door gun! Obviously not all at once. This could be a proper project in its own right, but I've gone for minimal detail as it'll be pretty small at 1/96 scale and I could be here for weeks otherwise.




I split this into a number of parts to print - forward cabin, rear cabin, tailboom being the major portions. The rotor head and rotor blades were seperate too (idiotic idea to try and have them both rotating) and took several iterations before I was happy with their strength. Pics later as I have currently mislaid the printed item...!

[DamienB]

LAS - Lookout Aiming Sight - a pair of these were mounted on little sponsons midships. Equipped with a variety of optical sights, the guns and Sea Dart could be visually aimed using these sights should the need arise, and as the name suggest were also used for basic lookout. Exposed to the weather, operators had the option of wearing a heated suit, which - along with the intercom headset - gave the wearer regular electric shocks to keep them awake. This was not by design!




Then I decided that I might as well do the upper superstructure. Forward bulkhead full of holes to save weight & resin. Holes in the upper deck for similar reasons, and to give access for a motor to rotate the radar.





Another view of the upper superstructure, with the various other bits connecting to it displayed too.The white domes cover satellite communication dishes; sadly for HMS Sheffield, it was comms on this system that interfered with one of her ECM systems that could have picked up the incoming Exocet raid that hit the ship and left her as a burning wreck.

[DamienB]

Blimey, it all adds up... controller for scale.


Around this time I compared my newly printed bridge with photos of the real thing, rather than the drawings I'd been working from. And was gutted to discover how far out the drawings were compared to reality. So, with the aid of many many photos I started re-doing the bridge, and with more experience of printing, also handled the roof in a different way to avoid the problem of resin piling up. Basically I left the roof off and printed it seperately. Now, that means I do have to glue it on... or... I could leave it as a removable item and show off the interior. Guess I better model the interior then. Do you know how big a single button on a control panel is when you print it at 1/96 scale? No, I hadn't thought about that either. Still, kept me off the streets for a few days.



New bridge and new bridge roof in place... some of the wipers broke off but they'll get fixed later.



Interior. All of the consoles printed as separate bits to ease painting, then glued into the bridge walls.




Rear of the bridge. Bit of a mixture of stuff you'd have found in HMS Coventry (and any 42) and more modern kit, as I have no photos of this area of Coventry's bridge.

[poshcarl]

Hi Damian. Your 3d products are really good, don't think that nobody would buy them. I would be interested in a set if you had the time to make them. If you would, please PM me with a rough price. Cheers Carl

[Detomo]

hi, very impressive work . Is there any chance of you making parts for other peeps who are not or have a printer , and are willing to sell them .

[DamienB]

Looks like I better consider it eh  My major issue is the minute you sell something the customer will expect a level of service, and I've been doing this entirely for me, so I can put up with little cockups and things breaking. I'll have a think about what I need to do.

[poshcarl]

Hi
The quality looks good. If people did buy they shouldn't expect perfection, you are a modeller not a professional business. Carl

[Rob47]

Looks like I better consider it eh  My major issue is the minute you sell something the customer will expect a level of service, and I've been doing this entirely for me, so I can put up with little cockups and things breaking. I'll have a think about what I need to do.

It works for others, look at Sirmar, one man show and Barry works full time, but he lets customers know that so they are aware of it prior to ordering.


Bob

[DamienB]

Sorry all, lost the energy to keep updating this thread. Will try and get back on track.
So, cunning plans. Having designed the bridge roof to be removable, I temporarily forgot that the rear end of the roof was partially covered by the 909 radome, which would prevent roof removal. Unless I only stick the radome down to the removable roof, and not to the main superstructure, in which case I could use the radome as a handle to pull the roof off. But if I do that... I need to have a radar inside the radome, right? So here's the type 909 target illumination radar (big dish) and its associated missile reference aerial (dome on a stick at the top) and jamming assessment aerial (the mini dish top left). The ship had two of these 909s in the big domes, so the ship didn't have any blind spots.



Soooo... attentive followers of this build may have spotted a bit of a theme of me deciding to do more and more of the ship from scratch. So I started on the main superstructure itself. The light blue rectangle at the bottom left is the size of the 3D printer's build area; as you can see this is going to mean chopping up the superstructure into many bits if I'm going to do it all. We'll see...