Miniatures: Headless mage

 It's all fun and games until your head goes flying across the kitchen table one morning...

So short story long, we were having a hell of a time getting things to stick to the glass bed of the Ender 3. This is nothing new, sometimes things aren't balanced correctly and the extruder gets too close or too far away from the plate to be effective. Sometimes there's stuff you can't see on the surface preventing anything from holding.

And then sometimes the printer likes to be an a-hole just because it can. 

This was one of those nights where no matter how many times we tried to print something, inevitably a part of it would come loose and get tangled up in everything else, effectively ruining everything else. My wife had designed some letters to print for a project she's working on and print they didn't. I washed the plate in hot water twice to no dice. I balanced the plate, balanced it again and balanced it some more because I could, running a balance print many times until finally it printed the squares correct to show that the balance was working.

Her print though, still wasn't. Coming away in parts and making a fine mess with each and every go.  

'Maybe it's just my design?' she asked as the night was getting late. To show her that it wasn't, I decided to print a random mini at low quality just to prove that the machine was being a bastard to all users and not just here.

Of course it printed out the damn figure just fine, the head removal incident happened the next morning. Sometimes machines just like to mess with your mind.

WHERE'S YOUR HEAD AT?

Cue the next morning where I had a grand total of sub three hours of sleep, most of it trying to drown out the noise of a low battery alarm on a smoke detector so far out of reach, you'd need a circus ladder to bring it down. Tired and unamused by the fact that it's beeping shenanigans kicked off at 1 in the morning, I almost forgot what I'd printed until I walked past the Ender. And picking away at the multitude of supports that printed with it while the kettle boiled for the first cup of the day, I suddenly watched the mage's head come clean flying off, crossing the kitchen table and hurling itself onto the floor. Not the normal behaviour of mages as you're aware and if I wasn't as bone tired as I was at the time, I probably would have laughed at the sight.

When you're an elf mage, it pays to plan a head.

Nothing a spot of superglue can't rectify of course and now she doesn't look like she's just been cut down to size by good old Fred 2 and his oversized cleaver. 

What I'm impressed by here is that even though she was a test print to make sure things were sticking, the model came out pretty well even on the lowest settings. Those lines you can just make out will probably become more prominent when painted of course but for a basic 'this will only take an hour' print, things look okay all things considered. You could easily have her as a piece on a board game or D&D session crawling through a dungeon or two.

Just try not to lose your head when a massive random monster appears..

Just for the sake of it and to see how my Game Color paints would go working with an unprimered surface, I gave her a basic coat of paint. While the paint did well in sticking you can really see those fine lines from printing at the lowest level. 

Still, good practise.

WHERE TO GET THIS ONE

The studious mage - Thingiverse
As part of a fantastic collection of player characters - Thingiverse