Char 2C (1:100)

The Char 2C (also known as FCM 2C) was a French super-heavy tank of the Interwar period, and went into service in 1921. I don't believe any of them ever saw action; those that were in service in 1940 when Germany invaded were either abandoned, or were destroyed by aerial bombing while still on the rail-cars waiting to take them to the front.

As such, this is yet another model that is of pretty limited use on the wargames table, but as usual I don't see that as a particular impediment to designing one for 3d printing.

I originally found a model of it on Thingiverse, but the geometry of that model was so bad that I found myself spending more effort on trying to fix it than I would have spent in designing a model of my own. So that's what I did. It's primarily based on drawings in one of George Bradford's books, plus various photographs I found on the internet. This is one of those vehicles that existed in a variety of configurations, so I make no guarantees as to absolute accuracy. However, it does look like what it's meant to be, which is a good start for a wargaming model.

This model is designed at 1:100 scale for 15mm gaming, and it's in several pieces for ease of printing — this image has been assembled digitally. As of writing, I have the last pieces on the printer and, all going well, I should be able to put it together tomorrow morning.

Next Day....

Here's the first test print (0.08mm layers, eSun PLA+), all assembled.

Unfortunately I got some pretty bad under-extrusion on the turrets, and they'll have to be reprinted, but it's done its job to let me know what works and what needs to be addressed.

The main thing (apart from the missing lifting lugs) is that, to ease assembly, it really needs some locating sockets that I can put bits of filament in to make sure the pieces go together in exactly the right place. This was done all by eye, which works, but isn't ideal.

There's a lot of printing in this — all together, for all the components, it took me about 23 hours. The track runs alone took 15 or 16; I split them each in half fore and aft and printed them standing up. I tried a config in Cura where I printed them each in one piece lying down flat on the print bed, and that timed out at about 9.5 hours (probably more like 11, knowing Cura's estimates). However, I find I get better, cleaner surface detail on vertical than horizontal surfaces.