{"id":4509,"date":"2016-05-30T16:05:41","date_gmt":"2016-05-30T20:05:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/?p=4509"},"modified":"2016-05-30T16:49:09","modified_gmt":"2016-05-30T20:49:09","slug":"medea-refinery-wip-part-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/2016\/05\/medea-refinery-wip-part-5\/","title":{"rendered":"Medea Refinery, WIP Part 5"},"content":{"rendered":"

Having spent\u00a0the day\u00a0at an X-Wing tournament, 10pm Saturday I finally got going\u00a0on the last two pieces for the Medea Refinery<\/a>. After cranking away through the night I managed to get them done just in time for our group painting session on Sunday…<\/p>\n

Both came out pretty neat: A reservoir tank, and a processing site.<\/p>\n

\"Reservoir<\/a>

Reservoir tank.<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Processing<\/a>

Processing site.<\/p><\/div>\n

Reservoir Tank<\/h2>\n

The reservoir tank was really fast and fun to put together. The\u00a0core component\u00a0is a great piece of junk plastic, half of\u00a0a broken\u00a0hot tub filter intake; the other half made\u00a0the smoke stack on the furnace piece<\/a>.\u00a0This part though\u00a0was actually the first bit I worked on for this build. Way\u00a0back at the start\u00a0I cut a chunk of foam to fill it as a quick test of a foam cutter<\/a> I got, then put it aside until I knew what to do with it.<\/p>\n

\"Cutting<\/a>

Cutting an insert to fill some junk plastic.<\/p><\/div>\n

Picking it back up, I looked around my bits pile to see what could finish it up quickly. The big find was that the lid of the hot chocolate canister used to make the\u00a0water tower<\/a> worked really well as a top component, looking like some kind of access compartment. Unfortunately it had a significant undercut to slide into the canister that\u00a0didn’t look good\u00a0set directly onto the top. I’m not sure how I\u00a0would have addressed this manually. Probably cut some foamcore to slide it into, but I hate cutting circles. Instead I 3D modeled a collar to fit exactly around the\u00a0lid and fill out the undercut, included some bolts for detail, and printed it out.<\/p>\n

\"Modeling<\/a>

Modeling the collar.<\/p><\/div>\n

After that I built a ladder following the\u00a0procedure I’ve used throughout this build<\/a>, glued on a bunch of hatches and\u00a0wall bits I downloaded and printed, and called it done. A simple, effective piece that’s a solid line of sight blocker at 4″ to the top.<\/p>\n

Processing Site<\/h2>\n

For the final piece I wasn’t sure what to make. Pretty much out of time, I didn’t want to embark on a building or similar structure. I also kind of\u00a0wanted a piece of just area terrain\/partial cover, not a\u00a0chunky line of sight blocker\u00a0like the other pieces.<\/p>\n

Rooting through my bits and supplies pile again I\u00a0started looking at some large wood dowels I have. It got me to thinking about a collection of small tanks making up a little chemical processing site of some sort.\u00a0In the end I only used\u00a0the dowels for the tallest tank because it was unfortunately a hard enough wood I didn’t want\u00a0to deal with cutting them all to size. But I started by designing caps to fit the dowels, and only at the last minute decided to print the barrels as well.<\/p>\n

\"About<\/a>

About to print the tanks.<\/p><\/div>\n

One\u00a0somewhat interesting modeling detail is that the caps have a concave underside so the barrels fit slightly inside the collar, rather than just surface mating. It seemed like it might be too much\u00a0area for the print head to traverse in space without potentially distorting the shape of the cap by collapsing a bit as\u00a0the underside hanging in open air sagged. The\u00a0printer software<\/a>\u00a0I use can automatically add supports, but in doing so it would also unnecessarily support the bolts hanging off the side. The underside supports would possibly also be a hassle to\u00a0cut off\u00a0because the automatic supports would cover a lot of area. So instead I\u00a0included the supports directly in the model as concentric rings of little divots that\u00a0provide just enough support, but flick off with your fingernail. After doing a test print\u00a0to check the supports and sizing against the dowels I decided to\u00a0double the number of them to eliminate a few loose stringers from sagging plastic that\u00a0had to be cut out. But after that these pieces required essentially zero post-print cleanup.<\/p>\n

\"IMG_20160528_225443\"<\/a><\/p>\n

With some tanks in hand I played around a bunch with different layouts. Eventually I decided to make another component, some sort of mixer that they all feed into and then push out to a larger tank, or a splitter doing the opposite.\u00a0In retrospect I wish I’d made the faux ports deeper so that the tubing had more length to sit in as it’s glued down, but I eventually managed to wrestle them into place.<\/p>\n

\"Initial<\/a>

Initial layout sketch.<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Gluing<\/a>

Gluing in the tubing.<\/p><\/div>\n

Done<\/h2>\n

That’s it for the construction of the Medea Refinery<\/a>! In fact, as I’m sitting here it’s actually already entirely\u00a0done; we had a very successful group painting day to knock it out.\u00a0Pictures from that will\u00a0be up very soon.\u00a0All of the printed models for the\u00a0processing site\u00a0are up\u00a0for free download on Thingiverse<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Having spent\u00a0the day\u00a0at an X-Wing tournament, 10pm Saturday I finally got going\u00a0on the last two pieces for the Medea Refinery. After cranking away through the night I managed to get them done just in time for our group painting session on Sunday… Both came out pretty neat: A reservoir tank, and a processing site. Reservoir … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4510,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[412],"tags":[272,320,323,274],"class_list":["post-4509","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-terrain","tag-40k","tag-libertyhammer","tag-medea-refinery","tag-miniatures"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4509","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4509"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4509\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4533,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4509\/revisions\/4533"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4510"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}