DFS 230 Glider

 

I was looking through some of the models for the many, many incomplete projects I've started over the years, and found the bits that I began for Crete. That was never very successful, as I don't have access to any 15mm early-war Fallschirmjager, mainly due to the cost of postage these days. I thought I could proxy them with some PSC plastic late war paras, but I never did anything about that.

However, one thing I can do something about right now is my parlous lack of gliders, so I put together a 1:144 DFS 230 in Blender that should print pretty reliably on my Ender 3 FDM printer. Hopefully.

I'll probably split it up for printing, though I haven't yet decided exactly how I'll go about that. The most straightforward method is just to split it longitudinally and print it in two halves, but those wings are very long and I've started having occasional issues with taller models becoming detached from the print platen.

We shall see.

Test Print

I printed this with the model split longitudinally, which gave me good results with the wings and tail planes, but the layer lines are very apparent on the fuselage. A decent paint job could disguise some of that, but it really needs quite a bit of filling and sanding.

The figures at back are Battlefront 15mm desert Brits — 15mm is the scale I'd be using the model with, but I don't have any Fallschirmjager yet to go with the glider. The figures in front are a 10mm (1:150 scale) Bren team I printed in resin on my Mars Pro; they're much closer to being in scale with the glider.

Split version 1:
Straightforward, but printing artifacts on the fuselage are problematic.

Split version 2:
More faffing about with assembly, but smoother printing results overall.

I was struck by how tiny the DFS-230 was compared with the Horsa, or even the Hadrian/Waco. It carried just 9 men (plus the pilot), even with so few it was pretty cramped.

FDG Goblin King Kitbash

 

Fat Dragon Games recently had a Kickstarter for a whole heapin' helpin' of new STLs, among which is a tribe of diminutive goblinish critters.

Their king is provided with a throne, as shown here, but not with any option for him to actually sit on his throne.

So I got to work with the STLs and kitbashed one together.

I didn't change the king's pose much at all. I just cut his legs off, separated them and re-sited them.

I had to give him a new pair of knees and a new kirtle, but the most labour-intensive part of the process was in removing the remains of the old base from under his feet.

That became a lot easier after I discovered the box trim and lasso trim brushes in Blender's sculpt mode, but it was still something of a grind: my computer is five or six years at least out of date, and with a puny 16GB of RAM I had to be sure to save after each and every cut to be sure that I didn't lose too much in the event of an out-of-memory crash.

I printed the new king enthroned twice, once in resin, and once in FDM using Tom Tullis' latest miniatures profile for Cura 5.x and a 0.4mm nozzle (with tree supports added).

To be honest, there's not a lot to choose between them, and at tabletop distances I think most people would find it a challenge to distinguish them.

The resin model has better definition of his toes, but I think that's mainly because the FDM supports under his feet detached from the build plate, and the feet ended up having to print in mid-air. Considering that, I think they actually printed surprisingly well.