15mm 3Dprinted SU-25 Frogfoot (1)

Some first pictures of my selfprinted SU-25 plane. It is 1:100 scale and I found this stl-file in this growing collection, which I mentioned in a previous post.

I am working on an inofficial plane addon for "TANKS The Modern Age" (still unsure, if this will work), and needed some planes. For the first version I wanted to add only planes for the USA and the Sovietunion, beside some new equipment cards and custom armoured AA units.

For the USA I had chosen the 1:100 A-10 fastbuild kit from Revell, you can find this review at Modellversium, but I am still waiting for it. Sure, I could go for smaller scales, but would it not be great if all has the same scale at the battlefield?

Finding an approciate plane for the Sovietunion was harder and ended in this thing. As I mentioned sometimes in the past, I am no aviation expert, but I think these two planes would be almost equal. At least they will have almost equal stats in the future addon.

The print took 7 hours and consumed 0,5 kWh (accourding to my new gauge), the plane was printed with an infill of 15 percent and weights 24 grams with all residue. It took some time to remove it, but when the residue was removed, the plane looked like this.

Not bad compared to the printer which was used, now it was time to optimize the model.

First I added a layer of Revell Plasto filler. This stuff has a strong chemical smell, much more then the Wamod filler I used before. 

One day later when the filler was hardened, I started with sanding, and as you can see, with all the filler and sanding the wings are starting to have a smooth surface.

The bottom does not look as good as the upper surface. To print the wings, the printer builds up some support structures (see the first picture) and, at least our prints, the models sometimes have a very rough surface after removing the support.

This was the case, but a good layer of Plasto and some sanding are a good start to smoothen the lower surface. But there has to be some more filler to add as also some more sanding.

Then it may get experimental. I got the very handy Trumpeter Scribe tool and some templates from Voyager Models, also I found some nice bluprints of the SU-25.

So I may try to add some panel lines. If I will mess up, I can always add a new layer of filler, but I may give this a chance.

And finally, I will have to make my thoughts about the armament of the Frogfoot, since there were no bombs or rockets included in the 3D files, I will have to improvise, print, loot, scratchbuild or whatever ist needed to get this thing some weapons.

More on that in a future post. At the moment I am printing some more stuff which you will see in the next posts, beside some proxies and more custom units for "TANKS The Modern Age".