3D printed Mini B-17 Flying Fortress

Hi Everyone,

We thought we would share with you our latest print. We hope you like it?

Its a B-17 Flying Fortress which is available from here: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:11052 All credit for the design goes to the original designer who has done a fantastic job with this design.

We have always been a fan of aviation and especially the WW2 era aircraft. The B-17 has to be my personal favourite aircraft - as you can imagine Im a fan of the film Memphis Belle.

We decided to print this in our Yellow PLA filament (http://www.3dexfilament.co.uk/product.php?id=7). Our PLA is really fantastic as it always gives great and consistent print results, is a nice vibrant colour and can be finished really well. 

The print was very successful. We used a layer height of 0.25mm and a speed of 100mm/s. This caused some wobbles on the print so we would reduced the print speed for a more high quality print. We also used a brim to make sure that the parts all adhered to the bed sufficiently. In total it took around 1 hour 30 mins to print this. We did not scale the model at all. The default size yields a model roughly 1:144 scale.

After printer it was a case of tidying up the print using a shape hobby knife. To glue the parts together we used general multi-purpose contact adhesive. There are 6 sections to glue together. We are pretty pleased with the plain yellow result but then decided to paint it to add the extra realism, however, we weren't going to go overboard with the detail as one can go on forever in that respect!

We primed the model with grey car primer. then applied wood filler to smooth out some of the layer grooves. However, we didn't sand the model which we probably would have done if we had some more time. We then gave it another coat of primer and then the final colour which were Humbrol model paints. For the decals we dug out some old decals we had lying around from old Air-fix kits. They weren't great quality but added an element of precision that we wouldn't have been able to achieve painting by hand. All together from download to what you see in the photos probably took 3 hours (1.5 hours printing and 1.5 hours detailing)

So the results are below. The model prints well and we think looks good! It goes nicely with our 3D printed spitfire. Please let us know what you think and share any similar projects you may have?

Please check out our website for future projects and all of your filament needs. www.3dexfilament.co.uk.

Cheers,
3Dex ltd