Tuesday, February 16, 2016

Month 12 - 3D Printing and Coping with MS

This is my first post in a very long time!  You can probably guess that if I had good news I would have been posting more frequently.  I am not sure how other people deal with disease but I try not to dwell on it so anything that I can do to keep my mind occupied is a good thing.  So this post will be about keeping my mind occupied.  In a couple of weeks it will be a year from when I started this blog, I will have also had an appointment with my Neuro to talk about the results of a second opinion and I will do another post then.  Honest.

In any case, here I sit at 5:00am in the morning (better to get up and do something than sit in bed and angst) with two 3D Printers to my left and two 27 inch monitors in front of me.  On my desk there is a modelers cutting matt with a fair number of blotches of paint.  There are five or six 3D Printed tank models in 1:100 scale littering my desk as well.  There is also a WIP diorama at 1:00 scale that will feature one of those tanks.  To my right there is a small table full of model paints and landscape materials.
My Two Ultimaker 2 3D Printers
View of my Desk
Some of my Bling Collection

I have always been interested in model building but have never really spent a lot of time doing something about that interest.  A couple of years ago I got interested in 3D Printing.  This led me to discovering the Flames of War table top gaming world as my printers are on 3D Hubs available in effect for rent and a local gamer used my service to print a tank.   So I am not a player (my disabilities at this point would make that challenging) but I am an active member of the community as a designer and supplier of 3D Printed things that can be used for the landscapes of their gaming tables. 

My Bailey Bridge Design Diorama
This has become a bit of a perfect storm for me and I have been spending a LOT of time on designing and printing various models for the FoW community (who I know largely through Facebook).   I have a storefront on eBay where I am selling this bling with the proceeds largely going to the benefit of the MS Society.  It is not making a huge amount of money which is fine because a) I really don't want to tie up my printers, and b) too much demand would be stressful and that is not what I need for disease management!  If I am lucky in anything it is that I don't have any money worries so can spend what I want on my toys!

My designs have gotten more elaborate as I have developed my skills though I am still a long way from where I would like to be.  I am particularly proud of two of my most recent designs, that of a Bailey Bridge, and a Horse Drawn Field Wagon.  

Work in Progress Diorama
I am not sure if the tech companies still have the position of "Evangelist" but I have decided that this describes me and 3D Printing in relation to Flames of War and modeling in general.  I am really enjoying the design of this stuff and of trying to incorporate my products into my own diorama's.  Lately I have been trying to recruit some modelers to do the same with my products and also with tanks that I print for them from a collection that is available for free on the web.  I have yet to see the fruit of these endeavors but for one but that one is pretty darn cool as you can see from the sample below.  I hope to see some more equally cool work in the near future as I have three or four more folks working on projects where I have provided stuff for free just to see the result. 

Work of Bill Ferguson
 Scenic Doctor


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