Thursday 21 June 2018

Neubaufahrzeug

Neubaufahrzeug Type A

Neubaufahrzeug Type B
I got this model from TigerAce1945 on Thingiverse, from his Test Print Factory collection.

The Neubaufahrzeug was Germany's first attempt at a heavy tank after Hitler came to power. It wasn't considered a success, and only five were made.

It printed pretty well. I sliced it in Cura, using its experimental "tree" supports, which came away very easily.

The antenna on the Type A is a bit rough, but that's not completely unexpected — the loop could have done with more closely-spaced supports than Cura's automatic generation gave me; it would probably be best to import the turret STL into Blender and rebuild it with dedicated support structures in place. The struts are quite delicate pipe structures printed at a fairly steep angle, so the stair-stepping is a bit visible, even printed at 0.08mm layer height; I don't know that there's a lot I could do about that, considering the limitations of my printer. I could try printing it a 0.04mm, but it would be a long print, and I'm not sure it would be worth the effort.

The track-guards are another tricky printing area. The whole guard slopes slightly down towards the rear of the hull at maybe 3°, and so rather than a smooth length of plastic, I got a series of longish plateaus as each layer was printed.

I'll do as much cleaning up with sandpaper and scrapers as I can, and see how it goes. There's not a lot of fine surface detail to worry about, so a spray with sandable filling primer will probably take care of any remaining striations.

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