The Battleship Bismarck 1:1000

thingiverse

The Battleship Bismarck was the sixth German ship to be named after Otto von Bismarck, the father of the German empire. She was the first of two ships of the Bismarck class along with her sister ship Tirpitz Her keel plates were laid down on 1st July 1936 at the Blohm & Voss shipyard in hamburg and she received her commission on 24th August 1940. She is most famous for Operation Rheinübung, a patrol to hunt allied convoys in the Atlantic, which saw her set out from Gotenhafen on Sunday 18th May 1941. This operation led to the Battle of Denmark Strait which resulted in the sinking of the Battlecruiser HMS Hood, jewel in the crown of the Royal Navy, in the early moments of the engagement. The sinking was a huge blow to British morale and led to the mobilisation of most elements of the Royal Navy in the area in a chase to catch and sink the Bismarck. Bismarck eventually had her steering gear disabled by a swordfish torpedo plane launched from the HMS Ark Royal on 26th May 1941 and her rudder was jammed at 12 degrees port. The final blows were dealt by HMS Rodney, HMS King George V, HMS Norfolk and HMS Dorsetshire the following day before the order was given to scuttle the Bismarck at 1000hrs on 27th May 1941. Only 115 of the 2200 officers and crew aboard were rescued. Print Settings Printer Brand: Prusa Printer: Prusa Steel Rafts: No Supports: Yes Resolution: .2 Infill: 60% Notes: Use a skirt. Really. It took me forever to work that out (and a good few hundred grammes of filament). I used 5mm - this prevented the overly long (250mm) thing from rising from the heated bed at the ends. Supports also help - 1.5mm spacing rectilinear is what I used but this is default. I didn't need to play with it. Ideally this would be the soluble kind though... maybe next payrise... Otherwise standard PLA settings as default with the Prusa i3 Mk. 2. How I Designed This Acknowledgements This is a scale model of the Battleship Bismarck as copied from Jack Brower's The Battleship Bismarck in the Anatomy of the Ship series of books. With the level of detail available making this model was simply a case of copying exactly the dimensions of each element of the hull, batteries and superstructure in a Blender model. I cannot recommend the book enough to anyone interested in modelling this ship. Indeed the series as a whole is excellent. This done all that remained was to make the model properly manifold (as best as possible - some errors remain but these are easily autocorrected by Slic3r). See the deformation at the bow and the non-existence of the barrells (model printed at 60% size) Modifications present and future Only one modification has so far been added in concession to the limitations of my kit. That was an enlargement of the leading edge of the bow to 0,1mm - which has so far been of limited benefit (see blue model below) I intend to extend that to at least 0,15mm in the next version, though using a smaller nozzle (which I don't have) would probably help. I also need to enlarge the barrells of the main and secondary batteries in order to strengthen them. Some of the decks on the superstructure could also use a few nods to the aesthetic to overcome technical limitations in printing the strictly accurate... 100% size model Printing Notes I cannot tell you how much time I spent fretting over the settings for this print, so in case you want to print it I thought I'd save you a bit of bother by telling you what I discovered on the way to the first successful print. The biggest problem by far was that as it it rather long (~250mm) and towards the end somewhat narrow - a sharp point at one end and only a couple of mm at the other for a couple of centimetres the first x prints had a habit of losing all adhesion to the surface and being picked up by the hotend on the next pass and being waved around over the heated bed until I could press HALT. See the mangled mess that the stern became I could not for the life of me determine the cause of this apparent insistence on the part of my printer to cause the near-left of the print surface to curl up (this is evident in several prints) and I blamed this on several, quite innocent, factors before finding a better solution. Support Materials One of the first things that occurred to me was that the support material was usually the first thing to get snapped up by the hot-end and wrapped into the next layer of print. Consequently I played around for ever with the distance-between-support-bits function and "sleeves" for the support etc. but this had no noticeable effect except to ensure a larger quantity of support material be available to be dragged into later layers. Raft I then thought that a raft might be helpful - separating the whole print from the print surface with a layer of support material but this was even less successful, indeed had the exact opposite of the necessary effect. I was left with a concertina-like mess of support material that peeled off the print surface with a touch. Brim What finally solved the issue was introducing a brim of 5mm around the entire print. While this could not stop the warping altogether it did at least keep the object stuck to the surface for long enough to allow a few more layers to print and prevent the hotend from actually picking it up. I just had to avoid the temptation to rip off every imperfection in the first couple of layers that emerged - any wisping of those first layers is natural, unavoidable, and irrelevant so you might as well leave it as is. Otherwise you print that first layer three times before anything gets done. Fill Density I will also be experimenting with a lower fill density, as I believe that this will also have some effect - I've yet to prove that though!