Tuesday 21 June 2011

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!)

2 comments:

  1. Looking forward to how they turn out.

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  2. The model is in plastic. Do you know what kind of plastic filament it is (ABS or PLA)? Yes, plastic 3D printing materials stick to paint. Actually, we use acrylic air spray paint for finishing touches of our war gaming collection. This 3D2PRO Series PLA filament is what we usually order: http://www.3d2print.net/shop/3d-printer-filament/pla-filament/

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