Aces High A Blood Red Skies Plog by CommodoreRob
IJNS Hiryu
Getting the STL files
So I acquired a 3d FDM printed in November and it occurred to me that maybe I could 3D print the carrier islands for the two carriers I needed for this project. So I went looking band found that the whole carrier was available as an STL file… So as you do you start to think big.
The files just needed a little scaling, and so with a click of a couple of button I had a 1/200 file. Bobs your uncle and Fanny’s your aunt…
Not so fast the carrier is just over a meter long in 1/200 scale. So not going to fit on my 25cm print bed. So it needed splitting up. That’s where my lack of expertise in 3d printing has shown itself.
The first cut I made was to waterline the model. At this point the slicer decided to start removing parts of the model. But I have been making models for a good few years now so I thought ok we can deal with this a bit of filling and away we go.
The first two sections of the Hiryu, as you can see a section of the deck was removed by the slicer. 
After some thought, I decided to print out a flat piece to the dimensions of the missing deck and then cut it to fill the hole. It took some messing around but I think I have sorted the issue just needs a little bit of filling. 
Part way through printing so far I have used a few kg of PLA and it's been nearly 40 hours of printing, still as I type this my printer is half way through printing the stern section.
So that's all the main sections of the carrier printed. The next bit is to pin and glue the sections together. Then fill the gaps in the deck.
