The little kitchen printed nicely and it's ready for paint and installation. I was happy that the slender faucet printed well. I watched it grow on the slicer and it looked like it was going to work. I had to add a slice of styrene on the front of the range hood. I thought this surface was suspect and I was right, but it didn't jeopardize the job.
I put another coat of white on the cupola window frames, this time using the Tamiya Gloss White. It's pretty good and I don't think it needs another coat.
I designed and printed some bricabrac (spelling?) including plates on placemats, vases and some table lamps. This was a marginal success. Some stuff is just too unsubstantial to print. Here's the drawing used for the place settings.
The cup and wine glass didn't work at all and left little tiny bump on the Vat Film. With the EPAX film I'm using, you can pop off this debris and just go back to printing again. It's very forgiving. The flatware shows up but it's so insignificant as to be not really there. With very careful work with the Molotow Chrome Pen I may be able to make the flatware visible. But the plates did work.
I found some various vases and a table lamp on the SU 3D Warehouse and attempted to fix the drawings and then print. The thin walls of the vases had to be filled up. I should have done that with the coffee cup and wine glass, but didn't. Those walls in 1:48 would have been in the few thousandths of inches in thickness and I don't care how good the printer is, it ain't going to resolve that because the resin simply doesn't have the wall strenght to pull off the FEP.
I put those diagonal supports from the lamp base to the shade so the shade would start printing. I also doubled the thickness of the lamp stem. Even with that 2 or the 4 lampshades broke off when cleaning them up. That crazy faceted vase had another problem; a lot of the interior was hollow so some failed, again, due to the thin walls. You can't 3D thin things like a piece of paper. Resin in its semi-cured state is just too weak to keep itself intact. I knew that faceted vase was hollow, but due to the way the original artist created it, simply closing the open end did not turn it into a solid. The other vases did close and become solid when I closed their ends. To print the wine glass and cup I probably would have had to close them up also. Actually, the wine glass should be printed with transparent clear resin. I don't have any.
You can see how one of the side walls of that vase broke loose. But I do have some successes.
And I got two lamps complete and the other two will be fixed with a piece of brass rod holding the shade. I had to make the shade solid. I suppose a piece of paper in a cicular tube could be used to make a "real" shade, but you're not going to be able to look down on these. You'll only see them from their side, so the solid shades will work.
I spent more time decorating the exterior walls. I got the fireplace right side done and started on its left side. I ran out of wide baseboard and crown molding so I printed some more late this afternoon. I'm definitely suffering from AMS on this project (Advanced Modelers Syndrome). I mean, seriously, mitering crown molding on a 1:48 model railroad structure. This is similar to the work that Lex Parker does on his narrow guage layout. He's Canadian so maybe that's why.
Here's another view of that crown corner. This is when I ran out of stock. Again... run out? Print some more. Just save the files. I've kept these trim files on the thumb drives since I suspected that I might have to re-run them. By printing on the plate, the moldings take all of 25 minutes to do a run.
I have to paint the fireplace fronts. Still thinking of what I want to do with that. By packing out around the windows gives a real nice scale thickness to the building's walls.
I had four to five days to finish these interior walls and I'm sticking with that estimate. It's painstackingly slow work.
