It’s time for another print-to-finished series!

This time I will be doing some (1:100 FT-17s from TigerAce1945’s Polish Armor pack - I will be using them for French service )

In anticipation of Simon Hall’s Division’s of Steel ruleset releasing (PDF coming next week so look for a review of that soon) I’ve been printing and painting 1940 French.

I’m guilty of being a Francophile and have always been fascinated with the French military culture. The French army of 1940 is somehow both vastly underestimated in popular culture (all the jokes about France being somehow “eager” to give up) and overestimated (“if the Germans had run into them they’d have been smashed” or “if France had somehow disregarded their entire doctrine and improvised an invasion of Germany in 1939 the war would have ended immediately”). In my opinion, France had a strong army at the start of the war but suffered from a “brittleness” due to a variety of issues across the board - had the Germans ran straight through Belgium in a repeat of 1914 I think its a toss up as to who wins instead of a foregone Allied victory.

ANYWAY I already have a robust armored force of H35/39s (my favorite WWII tank…yes I’m weird), Char B1s, and other odds and ends but I wanted some FT17s to go with my infantry.

FT17_in_slicer

Here is the model in my slicer (I use Lychee - much nicer than Chitubox). I’ve printed a fair bit from TigerAce and have learned its often a good idea to slightly scale down the turret to ensure there is plenty of room for it to rotate (I’ve scaled the turret down by 3%)

My workflow is typically to support the models by hand - the tracks look like they will print fine on the build plate so no worries there. Unless….

Tracks_need_supports

Aha! My Support Senses started tingling as I worked on the turret and decided to step through the layers on the tracks. There are in fact a couple islands so these will need supports after all - drat!

I usually get best results by doing vehicle hulls and turrets vertical. Unfortunately these tracks are going to need some fiddling with to print easily. I’m unsure if I should bulk print hulls and turrets and do a build plate with just tracks or print whole vehicles in a few lots. Heck, I may stick the tracks on using my very novice Blender skills (I normally am not a fan of printing tracks apart from hulls, too fiddly)

This is as far as I got before my toddler would no longer tolerate not getting 100% of my attention (I understand completely how French tank commanders in those one man turrets felt, cohabitating with a two year old is existing in a constant state of overwork). I will experiment more with the tracks and maybe do a post about how to stich stuff together in Blender later. Thanks for reading and en avant!