Ryan

Are you creating welds I see on the lower final drive panel? How is this done?

Got the upper hull blocked out...rough shapes anyway.

Perfecto.

My brain is hurting from suspension rework, so off to the upper hull....fenders up first.

How long does that take to print?

The turret is resin, yes?

Being a scale modeler, I was worried about layer lines, and yes they are pretty plain to see after a blast of primer. The good news is that if you use a high build primer they can be eliminated quite easily, as you see here only a faint trace can be seen. This was only after one round of sanding too.

Thanks for the advice, I need it.

Woo hoo, finally the swing arm is done and ready for printing. I designed it so I could hide bolts and features that can be printed separately, so I could FDM print the main arm and resin print the starfish plate and bolts in resin.

So its not all press buttons and things print flawlessly, there is a little old-fashioned modeling involved. The hull had one corner warp on me, so I need to fix it in place, I wasn't going to print it out again for 11 hours! Pics tell the whole fix. (that rhymes)

Yes you are correct, I have not made the (2) outer ones yet! The CAD drawing is for the center run of road wheels that are of a simpler design.

Got some more swing arm work done and test printed the axle system, the blue part.

Work continues on the FV, printed out the nose and made a start on the swing arms....roughing in the basic shapes.

Love the rims.

@SCRATCH BUILDERI'm using Fusion 360, the only issue was slight warping, I posted arrow and red circle to show the bridge the printer made to span the notch, just amazing.

As mentioned above I did also print the largest part on the model, the lower hull. Print was 11 hours and was trouble free except for these weird "hot spots" during the first layers. I also lost bed adhesion on the rear corner but I can fix this. The hot spots show as shallow depressions on the bottom of the model, very strange. Checking the model during printing was like popping in on the Thanks Giving Turkey every now and then! Despite the minor flaws I'm happy.

Did the same thing, you are right!

Ok had a productive weekend, I printed off a couple of test final drives and the largest of the lower hull components. The final drive is a little undersized and I tried (2) sizes of bolts heads to try and get better reveals around them. The small bolt head is 80% in size. I wanted to post pics right outa primer so those could see what you are dealing with as far as clean up. The larger bolt pattern cleaned up very well, but I think for a future print I should leave the bolts off and just punch them out. But that aside you can see from the finished drive, last pic, it came out better than I thought it would.

Hey GMK, I got the Creality CR10s-Pro. I want to print that final drive in max resolution to see what I can get away with in FDM. A resin printer is in the works for detail parts.

Final drive 99% done, I have a little too much belly on the nose of the hull near the bottom I have to correct. My printer is arriving today so I can populate this post with some physical tank large scale model parts on a large scale airplane model website.

Excellent, I have already warned the missus I will need another printer to create the finer details like this!

Wow that is a great resource, many thanks!

Thanks GMK, just trying to follow your excellent lead! I'll check out the turret you suggest.

OK we now have a closed up lower hull, how exciting....now for the running gear!

Got the end cap drawn in, tonight I'll work on the front of the hull then its onto final drives and idler mounts....the interesting stuff.