3D Printing & a Scary High Tide

 I recently stumbled onto a site the sells .STL files that are Star Wars themed (w/o violating copyrights).  It's called Imperial Terain and I highly recommend them.  I'm putting on a Legion game at the club in a few weeks and "needed" a star port and printed this one out.  3D printing is not fast - it took about 40 hours of printing time to create all the parts.  I'm sure I could have built something faster but it would not been as good AND I would have lost hobby time.  The real efficiency gain of 3d printing is once the printer is dialed in - it does it's thing without you being involved so it's a bobby time multiplier!

 For priming I tested using gesso as the primer - it's a lot thicker than normal primer or paint and does a good job hiding the striations (printer layers).  I think this works for terrain and other "larger" pieces so highly recommend using Gesso.  I have a bottle of liquitex gesso that's white and about 2/3 rds of the way through priming the top platform I realized I could color the gesso.  I mixed in a little black acrylic paint and got.....

A very nice, very Imperial grey color which did a better job hiding the red PLA filament.  Why red PLA filament?  Because I am a moron - when ordering on Amazon, I forgot to click on the color selection box and ended up with 2 spools of red.  I'm pretty much through the red and have 3 spools of BLACK PLA being delivered today.

 Add is some minor details and I got a fairly large landing platform.

Hobby work was suspended over the weekend as we had a super high tide Saturday afternoon.  The tide in our area was about 3 ft over normal.  That was more than a little scary but one has to accept this type of risk to live on the coast.

 My dock was under water about 1 inch and it was the first time I ever had to step up to get on the floating dock.

 There was a lot of water encroachment in the yard and our storage shed became a bit of an island.  I was very glad we put it up on stone pillars when my wife wanted it moved a few year back!

A submerged dock is usually not a happy place.  We escaped with out any apparent damage.  One of the neighbors floating dock sections broke loose but that was all the damage.  Next weekend, I'll need to go under the dock to check on the structure and clean out all the debris that gets caught up in the  eaves when the water rises.

The cause of the high tide?  A combination of a full moon and a storm system moving up the bay.