Lessons from a Miniature T-10M

Today, I printed another T-10M, and it turned out much better than yesterday's. Not only did I succeed in not breaking the main gun, but I also managed to remove the majority of the supports without marring the surface prior to curing. I guess I'm getting used to working with coloured resin faster than I thought I would. I also printed this model with 25-micron layers, so the print lines almost completely disappeared. Take a look:

However, there is still one problem:

Because this resin has different physical properties from what I had been working with before, the supports that run from the return rollers down to the tracks are impossible to remove with the tools I have. I can't exactly remove these supports in PreForm, because nothing will be holding the return rollers up then. On KV-series tanks, this isn't a problem because the return rollers are directly above the road wheels, as you can see on this KV-8:

However, on the T-10, as well as every tank in the Stalin series that precedes it, the arrangement is different, producing supports like this in PreForm:

I'm going to leave the 1:220 scale model of the T-10M as it is for now, but for the 1:285 scale model, I decided to add my own supports in Autodesk Inventor:

Here's the same model in PreForm. I have it highlighted, this way you can see that the software has not added any supports where I didn't want them:

Naturally, I have quite a few tanks that I need to give the same treatment to, but I'll take care of that as the orders come in. Time to run my third test!

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