Jan 032009
Delivered today were the printed parts for the Rockwell “Silent Night” stealth attack plane. The resin is good, but there’s a lot of surface roughness (“jaggies”) produced by the resolution limits of the 3D printer to be removed. Still, the parts fit, and test sanding of the underside of one of the wings went off without a hitch. This’ll be a pretty spiffy model once completed.
5 Responses to “Rockwell stealth attacker now in solid form”
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Looks great! Are the little jaggies a pain to remove? Or do they come off pretty easilly without ruining the shape?
The jaggies (I’m sure there’s an official name for ’em, I’m just reaching back into the mists of time and grabbing at an early computer imagery term) are pretty easily removed. The surface of this model is smooth… no surface features. So a bit of coarse sandpaper, and off they go. The “Space Park” was more difficult to deal with, since it *did* have lots of surface details.
Each little “terrace” is a bit less than a sheet of paper in thickness. Based on mating features between parts, it appears that the printer errs on the side of adding too much material… so that once everything is sanded smooth, the resultant mold line is what it’s supposed to be.
The Space Park was grown using a type of translucent resin that was a bit rubbery once cured. But this stuff is pretty opaque, and pretty rigid.
You anti-aliased your model!
You can reply in email if you want but what kind of 3D modeler do you use and how much does each model ‘cost’ to make? I’ve been trying to follow the home-fabber technology and both my wife and I would like to start looking at making some custom 25mm miniatures as well as model and diorama parts.
Thanks
Randy
[…] back in January I showed photos of the 3-D printed Rockwell “Silent Night” stealth design from 1973. […]