Zac Kavulich (TigerAce1945) released some time ago a pack of various marks of Shermans for WWII 15mm printing. Unlike Bergman's models, Zac's models were presented with separate running gear and hulls.
I took one of his track modules and decided to up-detail it a bit — not a lot, just enough to satisfy my 1:100 scale wargaming model sensibilities.
I got this far along when I realized that
- it would have been easier, and I would have been better off starting modeling from scratch, and
- I'd come far enough that stopping now and starting again would feel like a huge waste of effort.
So I kept going.
This is the end result. There's absolutely no detail on the far side, as my aim is largely ease of printing, and I thought a completely flat rear face would also make it easier and stronger to glue to the hull.
There's more that I could have done, but this seemed to me to be sufficient detailing for my purposes. Fortunately, an STL can just be mirrored in the slicer, so there's no real need to make separate models for something like a port and starboard track run.
The test prints worked out okay, but this is why I don't much like printing components separately in resin. It's just not very dimensionally stable, and I always get warping of pieces like this, to one extent or another.
Fortunately the warping here isn't so extreme that I won't (probably) be able to keep them flat against the hull with glue. Fingers crossed. They were certainly easier to print than they would have been had I done them as a single piece with the hull.
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