3D Print War Rocket is Fail

Hydra's Lair is the blog of Matt Beauchamp, an art teacher with "a passion for collecting, painting and gaming with miniatures." He's been working on miniatures for a pulp sci-fi game, "War Rocket". But unfortunately this happened:

Since the War Rocket ships are smooth and lack the ‘greeble’ of Star Wars style ships, the surfaces need to be extremely smooth and free of the texture left by the 3d printer. We’ve had problems making silicon molds since rapid prototyping (RP) resin leeches chemicals that cause the molds to cure improperly. This resulted in very bumpy, porous castings.

What did Hydra Miniatures do? They took their rapid prototyped master prints to a jeweler who used his normal techniques to produce bronze castings that can be buffed to perfection.

This scenario demonstrates the current state of affairs of 3D printing; it just doesn't yet work for every situation. The same could be said of early dot-matrix printers years ago. Remember them?

Via HydraMiniatures