The hull is 1mm thick and has struts inside to give it strength. I started a Cromwell and did the turret to scale thickness, it's strong enough for me to stand on.

Wow, stand on huh?

I also bet there's a difference between using plastic or ABS?





Jeff

Sorry to take so long to reply. It has been a busy time for government work.

You can paint both. You really should apply a primer first. Water based acrylics like AK won't want to bond to either ABS or PLA without a primer. Tamiya paint will cover but I have seen some issues with large areas.

Not as much as you might think in terms of being brittle. PLA will warp in heat before ABS will. I personally wouldn't want my tank in the Texas sun regardless of the material, but you would certainly have concerns with PLA.

Looks like 3D printing continues to grow a lot and come down in price while going up in quality and options.

I like the idea of using lasers to create a more continuous part. Might also be able to remove a lot of the "blockiness" from some prints. Or, being able to print both a conductive material and a substrate at once with the Voxel8. Still a bit expensive, but promising.

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/1...-at-ces-2014/2

My friend showed me some gaming figure heads that he'd done on his works new Form 1 SLA printer and it is amazing what they can do.

I think they need to become a bit more user friendly before people start swapping then for their plastic FFF printers. Also the running costs need to come down a bit.