Kit Printing Possibilities

 

I haven't bothered printing my models on my Mars Pro as a kit of components, because the water-washable resin I was using was so dimensionally unstable that the components never, ever fitted together properly.

However, the spirit-based resin I've started using has been behaving very much better, so I thought I'd give kit-printing a go again.

The benefit of printing a model in multiple parts is that I can adjust the angling of each component on the print bed to maximise the benefit of supports, without those supports interfering with other parts of the model. Also, if an individual component fails, the reprinting time is usually much shorter, and there's less waste of expensive resin.

The Wirbelwind hull on the left of this photo was printed in one piece, and you can see that the dense mass of supports required for all the little nooks and nubbins of the running gear has interfered severely with areas of the model geometry. 

Some supports went right through important parts of the model, while others broke away parts of the tracks as they were removed.

The model on the right was printed with the running gear as separate components, and a much better result was achieved.

I'll certainly be less definite about printing models in one piece in the future.