3D Printed Sabot Bases - My first CAD designed project

After watching some of fellow club members Steve's 3D printing videos and seeing a wave of "how-to" use sketch-up from the various You-Tube woodworking channels I follow, I decided to give 3-D design another go.

I present to you my first 3D-Printed creation - a sabot base which has a shelf for a unit label along the back.

Not the most exciting of topics but every journey starts with a single step forward (I know that was really corny). But there is a twist here.  A lot of rules I currently play with (Alter of Freedom, Blucher, and even my version of AoF for the Russo-Japanese War) require tracking multiple levels of fatigue for a unit.  At the club we currently use small red disks, which are either placed behind the unit or on the base itself as shown:

As you can see, the table can get very cluttered and often I get confused while moving a base, as the associated markers can get left behind and mixed up with other ones.

Hmm, seems like there could be a better way - what if we used the label shelf for more that simple unit ID tracking. 

No, that would be impossible, but yet.....

What if I line the label shelf with some "steel paper", put the unit tag on top and used small neodymium magnets to track unit status?  Why that might just work.....

Pictured is a sabot base with the ferrous paper attached and 3 magnets to mark this Japanese Regiment (1st Regiment, 1st Brigade, 4th Infantry Divsion) has three fatigue levels.  I plan on painting the magnets red so they stand out more and envision using other colored magnets mark other status types.

I can see using a system like this will really speed up convention games and keep the tabletop really tidy and easier to play on.

I made three prototypes for my first go.  The interior sabot dimensions are 40x40mm for the two smaller bases and the larger one is 60x30mm.

I'll continue to refine the design - one change that I know will happen is to open the floor of the sabot base so it's just a 5mm lip running across the interior.  That will be enough to hold a base in place while reducing the print times and filament used per base.

I'm strangely excited to try these out on the tabletop as I think it really will improve gameplay.  We'll see....

I do have one warning here - Historically, I have found trying to learn CAD really hard and frustrating.  One of the primary reasons for my past failures was I'd give up after 30 or so minutes, pronounce the whole the impossible and start looking for third parties to blame - just like our idiot President Trump.  This latest attempt was more successful as I dedicated 2+ hours to learning the software and tried to imitate one of the aforementioned woodworking tutorials - I had one window open on my mac playing the how-to video and a second one open with sketch-up and me trying to mimic what I saw.  "Monkey see the video for 30 or so seconds, Monkey do in sketch-up".  While tedious, it worked.  Now I'm nowhere near proficient in the software but I can least navigate it and have a solid base of knowledge to build on.

I fell obliged to restate a point from above.  The whole sequence of "Monkey see the video for 30 or so seconds, Monkey do in sketch-up" isn't really true.  It was more like "Monkey see the video for 30 or so seconds, Monkey try in sketch-up, Monkey re-watch segment, Monkey try again and then  Monkey curses, Monkey re-re-watches segment.........", well you get the point.

Still after awhile the core concepts of how to use a mouse and the myriad of tools/options one has in the software started to become clearer to me.  Mouse clicking is different for CAD the normal PC use so you do need to learn some new basic techniques - single, double and triple clicking have different uses.

The moral of this story - CAD is actually a lot of fun but don't give it a try unless you can devote 2+ hours for your first iteration.  I think it's worth the effort and if a moron like me can do it then anyone else can also.

My woodworking Sketch-Up tutorial of choice is from Steve Ramsey's woodworking channel "Woodworking for Mere Mortals".  Here's a link to the specific video.  I like Mr Ramsey's communication style but there are literally thousands of how to use sketch up videos on you-tube - find someone who you don't mind listening too and give it a go.