The Lion’s Little Legion

I’ve located files for most units I will be printing and the vast majority need to be manually supported before printing. I don’t claim to be a support expert by any means so I will be relying on auto-supports and following the advice from the channel OnceInASixSide on youtube in an effort to teach myself how to get this done with a relative minimum of post processing fuss.

I managed to print off a number of Tactical marines, Dark Angel Veterans, and some scouts for testing. I’m quite happy with the details on these test models and the supports came away quite handily so I’m going to go ahead and do full plates.

The downside of resin printing is brittleness so I’m also testing a couple of different resins that I’ve never worked with before at this scale, I’ve only used both of these on terrain up to now. The light grey is Elegoo’s ABS-Like 3.0 while the darker grey is Sunlu’s ABS-like Dark Grey. they seem pretty evenly matched in terms of rigidity vs flexibilty. No brittleness. In fact the sergeant bounced clear across the room after taking it out of the curing machine and the banner and pistol arm are surprisingly undamaged.

In December 2025 I will turn 40 years old. I’ve never been one to worry about milestone birthdays, I’m a simple man, steak and cake is pretty much all I need for a special occassion.

However this year I have found myself reminiscing  a bit more than I would have expected and I wonder is this what a mid-life crisis looks like for a thoroughly dull individual like myself?

I’m specifically thinking back over my hobby for the last 30 years and about all the projects I wanted to do but never quite got around to. I asked myself which of those I would most like to have done or at least made a good attempt at over the next 6 months.

Now it’s been probably 12 or 13 years since I was last interested in playing Warhammer 40k although that is where I cut my teeth in my youth.  Like many it was the constant price hikes and poor rules but ultimately it was the shuttering of the specialist games that made me cut the chord with GW.

But at the start of it all, wee 10 year old me bought my first miniatures, a squad of tactical marines and I painted them as Dark Angels. These remain my chapter of choice to this day and when I was young and ridiculous I said I would one day like to have a full chapter of Dark Angels… so that is what I will be doing… just not with 40k miniatures. That would be insane, I have neither the time nor money for that sort of endeavour.

What I do have are two resin 3d printers, a love of 10mm wargames and a small degree of skill in 3d modelling, just enough to be able to modify the work of other talented sculptors to suit my needs.

The idea struck when I came across a set of Mark 7 armour 8mm marines on a certain website. I’ll omit the creators name in light of the nature of the files. I’ve seen a few different creators tackle small marines but they usually focus on Heresy era armour. With that inspiration I started looking around for terminators, scouts and bikes, tanks and found many options to choose from. The only issue was the scale.

Having printed off a few models including these marines and some Eldar and Tyranids from other creators I decided I do not like 8mm, or at least what GW claims as 8mm. It doesn’t have enough detail to be satisfying to look at, particularly for Guard or Eldar as these end up being 6 or 7mm if you were to scale them correctly to the space marines and I plan to do other forces.

It was time to up the scale and given that modern space marines post the whole primaris debacle are something like 9 feet tall, that gives us marines of around 11.9mm at a rate of 1.33mm per ft of height assuming 8mm to mean 6ft tall standard humans. This allows me to print Eldar, Tyranids and others at a decent size but still be in what I consider proportionate scale.

One question I considered is whether I will be embracing the Primaris marines and I have a mixed view on this. As much as I detest the Primaris background. I much prefer the newer “true scale” look of the marines, and to my eye the STLs I’ve found seem to have the marines scaled more in line with the primaris proportions. Many of the primaris vehicles look terrible and a space marine tank that floats is downright tech heresy of the highest order and I’ll be having none of that nonsense. That said, if I find a primaris vehicle I like, I’ll include it. I already have some primaris helmets that I will be using for some digital kit bashing.

So I will be doing whatever I feel like doing basically.

Am I overthinking the scale bit? Probably. Am I creating work for myself? Definitely!

Time to get going!