3D Printing WW2 6mm for Spearhead

The organising of the British Armoured Divisions for Spearhead continued. The nice thing about having a 3D printer was that when I found I needed some models, I could just print them if the STL files were available. Most of the files I was able to get for free from Thingiverse.

Allied Sexton Self-Propelled Guns

Here are some that I printed. The files are free. There is a huge collection made by m_bergmann on Thingiverse. The files were designed for 1:200 scale but are easily resized to 1:285. Reduced to this scale a couple might need the barrels enlarged, but surprisingly few.

I accidentally printed the first couple a 1:385 and was amazed they were still recognisable and printed fine!

A resin printer would no doubt be better, but with even with the standard 0.4mm nozzle on my nifty Flashforge Creator Pro filament printer the results are surprisingly good.

Sextons removed from the raft and cleaned up

The great thing was that I made a list of missing vehicles as I was re-organising. Then I just set the printer going without having to wait for the models to turn up a week or a month later. 3D printing can be quite slow, especially as these need to run in high quality mode, but leave it running overnight and you have a set of models ready for you in the morning.

Here is a shot of the slicer for a group of 16 Sherman V tanks printed as separate body and turret on a raft. In the top right corner of the picture you can see it will take 7 hours 45 minutes to print all these at high resolution. Roughly 30 minutes per model.

It is important to take care when separating the barrels from the supports.

Sherman Vs ready for the paint shop

The end result allows you to leave the turret loose or glue them on at different angles to add variety. Because I have shrunk the scale from 1:200 I find that the clearance has shrunk between the lug under the turret and the hole in the body. Some work with a file soon fixes that, but it is a little fiddly.