3D Printed Sopwith Triplane

You may have seen on Steel on Sand's blog about the 'not' Blake's 7 ships purchased from Shapeways and co-incidentally my first order from Shapeways arrived today courtesy of UPS. Tempted as I am by the Blake's 7 ships (and I will not be able to resist, the Liberator is such an iconic image of my childhood), my first purchase was a couple of 1/144th Sopwith Triplanes and an Austin Osprey designed by Kampfflieger (more noted for their wonderful paper kits).

I was expecting to receive a pack of several pieces and was surprised that the models are one piece castings and nicely detailed enough that they will fit in with my metal and plastic WWI collection. I must confess to still not being able to quite get my head around the process, but then I don't really understand how the TV works, so will just accept that it does. The models are in a plastic which I am not sure how it will react to paints, glue, cutting etc, but I'm not anticipating any problem even though I picked the cheapest material (you can upgrade) but whilst slightly rough I think they will look fine after undercoating and painting (the pictures here are blown up about 3x actual size so the effect looks exaggerated).

I must say I'm really taken with this whole idea and want to find out more about 3D printing as it seems a great way of getting obscure planes into production with less cost than traditional methods (and yes, I was thinking about aeronef, ships, experimental tanks etc, etc!)