Churn Baby Churn

This poor printer is just running through kilometers of filament churning out dungeon pieces. I am personally very tired of grey filament. Very, very tired.

There should be two printers doing this, halving the time, but my other one is still down waiting for the replacement board I ordered this week. They haven't even shipped it. Sure, they're blaming the holidays but I need the stupid board. The printer is a doorstop without it.

And then I had a clog that was resistant to the normal methods of removal. It was kind of cool to see the filament extruding in two streams instead of one but that's not really the point. For the first time I used the acupuncture needle they include with the kit to try to move whatever little piece of gunk that was in the way to a place I could remove it.

Then it was a few rounds of cleaning out the nozzle (look up 'atomic pull' for the details) and then it looked like it was good. Although I didn't see the piece of whatever in the cleaning filament.

I 'lost' about twelve hours of printing because of this. I could have tried to clear it last night after the print finished but I was too darn tired to trust myself with printer maintenance. I know better. I'll give up the time to make sure I do it right. This morning I was there, swearing at the printer, doing maintenance.

I should do some calibration again and I think I'll do that when the other printer is ready to go. I will calibrate them both at the same time and then it's off to the races. At least off to 'printing the rest of the dungeon pieces'.

I have the lights for an LED torch wall section but I'm iffy on doing it now. At least I'm iffy on doing it for the convention dungeon. I have a legitimate reason. Hear me out.

The piece is rather clever. The part where the torches are is a separate piece you print in transparent orange (or yellow or whatever) and then there's holes in the back where you shove the mini LEDs. Overall it's a very efficient design using an off-the-shelf light string and battery holder. But here's the catch. That entire panel of torches is out of the transparent filament. So there's this line of orange in the middle of the stone.

This isn't a problem with the addition of that thing called 'paint'. But as of now I don't think I'll have time to paint it before the convention and I don't want to bring it primed because then there's fingerprints on the primer and I don't know how the rest of the paint will adhere. Right now it's all a consistent light grey. To use the LED torch walls I would have to paint the orange sections at least and then they'd stand out just as much as if they were still orange.

It's something I'm pondering. Once I find my airhose for the compressor (dammit I hate losing things) then I can figure out how long it would take to paint this. I can practice on scatter. I plan on using the primer as the main color and then just accenting it with some random bricks and overall drybrushing. And then there's varnishing. So it takes time. Time I could be spending painting the darn minis.

I might have to give up on the airbrush for priming and either use the rattle can or paint it on. I want to use the airbrush but I don't want to waste too much time looking for the missing hose. And before anyone suggests it I want this hose for a reason. It's brand specific so it's threaded properly, it's a braided hose so it's more flexible, and it has the quick disconnect adapter attached to match the quick disconnect adapter on all my airbrushes. It's not cost effective or useful at all to buy another hose and adapter. I'll look more tonight and if not tomorrow I bring out the rattle can and be annoyed.