I have a new toy...

Holy crap dude!! I'm totally jelly now. 

BK

Very cool!

Good deal, G. I hope you have lots of fun with that.

Thanks guys!  I‘m no 3-D artist, but have some parts in mind that are not hard to do in CAD but are fiendishly hard to hand build.

I think that it must  be terribly hard to do CAD work and get it all sized right. I think it would take me forever to get it right between printing tests of the design, re scaling it, re printing. I would use so much resin on that alone!

Yes, for tight tolerance objects it would require more effort.  I have hand built a lot of stuff, and the critical measurements are where the new parts meet the old parts.  And that is where a combination of skillful measurement and experience in designing in “skootch” comes in.  I’m pretty good at the latter.

What CAD software are you using?

Don,

I use Autocad in my office, and my coworkers have been trying to get me to learn Sketchup for a while now.

What my coworkers do is draw 2-D plans in CAD, then loft the drawings into 3-D using Sketchup.  I have read that some 3-D modelers do the same.

My first project is primarily a solid of revolution, which means I only have to bang out a profile in 2-D.  There will be some other shapes to be added, but not much.

To avoid keeping anyone in suspense, the project is the anti-grav unit for a MaK Neuspotter drone, which is actually an MPC AT-AT “neck”.  The kit parts do not match up well, and the end caps have fine raised ribs with a seam that is nigh impossible to clean up.

Ditto on what Brandon said!!!

       Question?

 Is that the kind that makes the part in resin and slowly draws it out of the liquid?

TB,

Yep, it's what is called an SLA printer.  There is a hi-def LCD screen that puts out UV light on the lower section of the printer.  The printing bed slowly moves up as the object is created, so what you see is the thing being printed upside down.  My friend gave me his remaining resin - "ABS-like", translucent, and clear.

As an old school builder, I did feel 3-D printing was a bit of a "cheat" at first, but have come to welcome it as another tool that allows us modelers to do things we previously could not.  Intricate parts with repeating details are very difficult to do, but are easy with CAD.  An aircraft wheel with circumfrential tread for example, only needs a section profile, and the bolts are easily spaced around the hub.  There would be no way I'd attempt to glue little bolts in an exact pattern on a wheel!  Someone with a high precision lathe could cut the wheel and drill the bolt patterns, but I'm not that guy.

But I can do CAD.  I did a 3-D TOS Enterprise as a fun practice when my first job got CAD, but it crashed the machine because it only had an 8086 processor.  A what you say?  Google it, kids.