Original plan – spend the evening painting up my VBLs

Actual occurrences – spend the evening getting annoyed with STL files from a certain kickstarter.

Over the last few days I’ve been taking a look at the British Paras, trying to understand what’s going wrong with them. I even had a chat with someone who 3d prints models commercially who, upon looking at one of the files from the pack, proceeded to repeatedly say “WTF” while looking through the geometry before declaring the files basically DOA.

I appreciate I’m new to this whole 3d printing thing but there are some really bad giveaways that something isn’t right with these files.

Now I need to preface this with the fact I hate talking about things being bad in the hobby. But out of the several thousand STL files I have on my 3d printing drive (thanks Patreon), none of them have caused me anywhere near the same amount of annoyance as this kickstarter.

I’m not going to go into too much detail but this is one cross section of one model. Already there are a couple of issues you can see here:

• Void inside the helmet slung at his waist
• Void between his body and his vest, despite there being no access or visibility to that section
• Thin walls and an open space inside the L85’s rail system. Although realistic, those thin walls are just going to snap during printing, especially if they are supported.

Overall, lots of places that should have been backfilled to make it easier to print. Let’s take a look at the printed models now. These are unrepaired, as the repaired versions broke even harder and turned some of these voids even larger

Before even off the supports, the rail has collapsed of it’s own accord. You can also see the sunglasses, where the void behind them has collapsed in.

A few days later, clipping open the helmet reveals a void and nice shiny unset resin. Not pleasant to find.

So technically this is another figures (you can see our running man up top) but surprise, surprise, big void between body and vest. Worse, this left the tops of the vest super thin, meaning it very quickly tore during cleanup.

More details on this as it goes, but annoyed comment on the kickstarter so we’ll see what that does.

Short answer – not an especially helpful answer.

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