The Lion's Little Legion

When I last updated this project it was more of an idea than a reality. Since then, I’ve spent hours focused almost entirely on the printing and preparation side of the project — and I can now say with mild horror that around 80-90% of a full Dark Angels Chapter is printed and a good chunk of that is also assembled/ready to paint.

In rough numbers I now have 50 Rhino chassis, 200 Terminators, 600 Tactical Marines, 200 Devastators, and 150 Assault Marines ready to muster.

The Ravenwing are no less impressive, with around 100 bikers, 30 attack bikes and 20 Landspeeders
Add to that 150 Scouts, 30 scout bikers, 10 scout landspeeder storms, 8 Land Raiders, a good scattering of Predators, Whirlwinds, Dreadnaughts and some flyers.

The 3rd, 4th, and 5th Battle Companies are now fully built as playable, coherent forces.

Basing workflows are streamlined — 100 infantry on bases now takes me just 2 hours to prepare.

Printing has largely slowed, with only flyers and some support vehicles still to go, along with some character/leader models.

The big ticket items to be printed are:
Drop Pods
Thunderhawks
Thunderhawk Landers
Maybe a relic Stormbird

Printing at this scale has been equal parts rewarding and… educational. Failures and reprints are inevitable, I’ve found that parts needing most support tend to be anything that hangs slightly down below the model’s centre line when lying on it’s back – printing at the 45 degree angle tends to support anything above the centre line better than below I’ve found.

I initially prepared my files in squads, marines, sergeant and specialists…. but found that this actually slowed down things trying to keep them organised when curing, so I switched to batching by type – eg all bolter tactical marines, then special weapons, then heavy weapons alongside devastators, sergeants all printed together etc. This allowed me to sort everything into Aldi’s finest bits boxes and made assembly easier because I just grab from the correct bin to fill out a squad.
I also initially thought given the size of the minis it would be better to cure them on supports and remove them later.

That…. was a mistake. It certainly sped up the curing stage just plopping whole batches of minis down but I have a whole company of assault marines that I’ve had to put in the bin because getting them off the supports was a nightmare of broken limbs and snapped off bases.

After that I started removing everything from the supports pre-curing the same as I would with 32mm minis. This has the dual benefits of being practically effortless and massively reducing scarring and breaks, but inevitably makes the post processing much longer initially. This is worth it in the long run.

This project has moved from “dream” to “unnerving reality.” And that has serious risks for my ADHD. Up to this stage I’ve been in hyperfocus on the printing side, hence the lack of updates. The risk here is that the hyperfocus wears off when I switch to full time paint mode…. and then these just join the pile of potential…. I’m determined that this will not happen so fingers crossed I can keep that procrastination monkey out of this!

I’ve already made a lot of headway on the 3rd company so next entry will focus on that.