eBay Miniatures Rescues is back with another video, and this time he’s showing us how 3D printing with the Anycubic can make resuing minis easy!
eBay Miniature Rescues is a unique channel that shows you how to take beat up, damaged minis, and restore them to their fullest potential! It’s a relatively new channel on YouTube and it’s super fun to watch what Casey is able to do with some once hopeless miniatures. This week, he shows us how you can use the Anycubic Photon S to print bits and save minis for cheap!
Rescuing Miniatures with 3D Printing: Tutorial
Anycubic recently sent him a 3D printer to try out! They sent him their Photon S model and told him to put it through the wringer to see how it performs.
He simply loves it because not only can you print full-size minis, but you can also print bits as well. When you buy stuff off eBay it’s condition is speculative, at best! This allows you to spruce up the cheaper minis without long searches for additional bits. If you want to get one for yourself, go check them out.
The Army Being Rescued
He recently bought a large Ork force off of eBay for only $145! Not too bad but many of the minis were missing arms, backpacks, wheels, etc… What better time to start printing bits? Let’s put the Photon to the test!
Printing The Bits
The first thing to do is to go get your files online. He was surprised how easy it was to find good Ork bit files online for free. There are so many STL files out there it’s generally not that hard to find what you need. Next, just do the quick adjustments to get your printer ready after you first buy it. Then load in the files and wait for them to print!
You can see the quality of the bits right away. Once everything is printed it’s time to start the rescue!
Storm Boyz
He printed all kinds of stuff for this guy! He printed the smoke in the back to act as a flying base, the backpack, and the Powerklaw arm. To build it he pinned the pieces on just to give that little bit of strength. Once everything is sprayed up you can’t tell the difference! The printer is off to a good start.
Ork Trukk
This Trukk was in really bad shape! But he did get it off eBay for only $14 so can’t complain too much. As you can see this thing needs all kinds of love to be used again. He found the files for the wheels, the driver, the front piece, and all kinds of extra goodies for free! Let’s see how it turns out with the new bits.
It’s almost hard to believe how quickly he could do this! He started by scraping off the excess glue and trimmed down the old tire supports so he could get the new ones on. Then he grabbed his new pieces and started throwing them on! Really amazing to think just how quickly you can transform a hopeless mini with 3D printing.
You can really let your imagination run wild when printing. As you can tell he added insane amounts of extra pieces all over the Trukk.
His Thoughts
While buying bits and things off eBay can be fun, this is just such a fast way to rescue an army! It is a really cheap and fun way to get exactly what you need. No need to worry about where certain bits are going to come from. Just print them! Overall, he loves the printer. It lets you really make an army your own by adding whatever bits you could ever want! Take one more look at some of the stuff he was able to do!
That does it for this one! If you want to learn more about how to 3D print yourself, check out our article on it below!
Watch the full video above, and be sure to follow eBay Miniature Rescues on YouTube now!
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About the Author: Travis Pasch
Travis Pasch
Job Title: Head Writer & Editor
Socials: @paschbass
About Travis Pasch: Travis has been a Warhammer 40k hobbyist since the 1990s, playing the game since Third Edition. Through extensive traveling, he’s seen a lot of the miniatures hobby from across the world, giving him a unique perspective on the latest gaming topics and trends.
Travis’s brother even owns a commission painting studio, where he’s picked up a lot of good advice and techniques for painting Warhammer and tabletop miniatures over the years, as well. Travis joined the Spikey Bits team in 2019 and has been the lead writer since 2020.
Currently, he’s working on converting all his 40k Adeptus Mechanicus models and becoming a true tech enjoyer, complete with both sad and happy robot noises!
