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I know a lot of people are interested in 3D printing and how it might change modeling, and I'm one of them! I've been experimenting with a high(ish) resolution printer called the B9Creator and I'll chronicle my mekaniacal results here.

To start, here is the Grotzooka I modeled in Tinkercad to be retro-fitted onto my old-style metal Killa Kans:

You can see (and copy, and edit) the 3D file here: https://tinkercad.com/things/bq5fJ17hKFg

Neato! looking forward to seeing this progress.

I've printed 6 of these so far, and learned a bit each time. 3D printing isn't hard... but it isn't easy either. This image is from the second batch. You can see that barrel is a little misshappen- this happened because I didn't put in strong enough supports and because the printer 'jammed' and skipped a layer.



The actual printing material is a translucent red resin, and it does not photograph well, so I've hit it with a hasty coating of white primer. You can see that the details are really nice and clean in some areas, and there is a bit of cruft in others. I haven't actually tried to 'clean' this part yet, like I would with any molded plastic part, and that will help a bit. But I'm unsure how the stair-stepping, an unavoidable result of the fact that the printer creates objects in discrete voxels, will look when painted. I'm going to try the hot acetone trick, and if that doesn't work, I'll try tumbling to remove the stair-steps.