Sixth CAD Tutorial: Chain of Ships and Stupidity

A while ago on Shapeways, I received a request to make a sprue of several different ships. Now, were it two or three fairly similar designs, I might be able to do such a thing, making identical hulls, arraying them, and then adding the different features before making the full-size sprue. However, the request was for re-scaled versions of six different ships I already had, and the re-scale factor wasn't even the same for all of them. Now, for those of you who do a lot of 3D printing, you're probably thinking "what's the big deal? Re-scale them and attach a sprue, then remove the redundant triangles." How about no, for the same reason that I usually don't put tread detail on my tanks (I could easily make individual track segments and render tracks much more realistically, but creating a printable file from it would be a nightmare). Altering .stl files is NEVER a quick process, so I try to avoid it as much as I can. Fortunately, I am quite experienced with making interlocking prints, and I decided that the best solution was to make a chain of ships, rather than a sprue. This has the added advantage of being able to flop all over the place and not have models break off and get lost. So, without further ado, here is how I did all that:

https://www.bitchute.com/video/cmHLOYiTqx71/

You can view the 3D model here if you don't feel like watching the video to get to the product link.

By the way, if you're wondering why "stupidity" is in the title of this post, it's because I kept doing stupid things when recording the video. It's not that horrible, and certainly not enough of a problem to merit deleting my work and doing everything over.

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