3D Design/3D Printing/CNC Service - South Jersey Shipyards

Printers are quite busy prepping for NATs.

I will have a large selection of stuff in my 3DP grab box. Props, rudder gears, rudder chain sprockets, servo mounts, gearboxes, etc. Lots of good hardware stuff.

Also a photo update on Wasp. Still chugging along there.

And a fresh VDT off the printer for a captain in MI.




My goal is to fill this box:

 

And another 3D Hull done, thanks to @Beaver for the collaborative effort.





Coming to terrorize combat ships during campaign Soon ™️

 

Kawaii!!!

 

I need one with a flight deck and some grasshoppers....por favor lol

 

Just updating this with my current hulls, hulls that are in the immediate pipeline, hulls that are 3-6 months out:

Currently Available:

FN Suffren
HMS Invincible
SMS VDT
HMS QE (Malaya/Barham)
USS Wasp
LST
USS 1920 South Dakota
FN Jean Bart (Version 3 revised is currently being finished)

Immediate Pipeline:
Kaiser (50% finished)
Emile Bertin (Just needs final polish)
La Galissoniere (Not started)
Fiji/Town-Class (Final polish pass)
Blucher (30% finished)
Update Mogador to 2023 specs (90%)

3-6 Month Timeline:
Medium Convoy (Altmark/T2/Victory/Liberty?)
Yorktown Class
Midway Class
Essex Class (15%)
USS Texas
USS South Carolina
HMS Dreadnought or Erin or Tiger, depending highly on plans available

6-12 Month Timeline:
IJN Nagato (By request)
Iowa (By Request)

This list is not concrete, and the ships on this list can be shuffled around at basically any time. To me, ships are an extremely iterative process. If I learn something new I may pull all the previous hulls out of production to refresh them with the new method.

I need to find a new vendor to partner with for my laser cut decks, and I'm busy prepping for 2023 IRCWCC NATs. I will sit down after nationals and work out prices for all current hull offerings.

 

I already have an Iowa hull and about 75% of a Texas hull I can send you to cut up for combat.. Save yourself the design work on that part at least.

 

Hey, that'd be awesome. That would speed up the queue a ton which I'm sure the populace will appreciate.

 

Some big developments have occurred over here at South Jersey Shipyards, and I hope to share them with you all soon. Keep an eye open in the next few days...

 

Well here is the announcement:

South Jersey Shipyards is going from prototyping and testing to actual production and legitimate storefront!

I am super pleased to announce www.southjerseyshipyards.com! Check us out: Home (southjerseyshipyards.com)

Please be patient with me and my helpers as we get things rolling and learn the ropes of this whole small business thing. Everything is currently available as a pre-sale/made-to-order system, and I hope to transition to a stock-on-hand system in the coming weeks.

What this means is that ship kits will be being printed on-demand based on first-come-first-served basis until we get past any initial rush and can then keep a single of each kit on the shelf for quicker shipping.

More ships will be added to the site and store as I have time, for now only Suffren and Invincible are available but we will be expanding that collection over the weekend to include all of my currently available ship hulls.

We also have merch! T shirts are on their way and will ship out to pre-sale buyers hopefully August 4th.

If anyone has any questions or concerns, please let me know.

(For all who asked about placing a ship kit order and I said "wait til after nationals" feel free to complete that order via the storefront and I'll get you under production!)

 

So the kits +electronics is obviously more. But does that include servos, fire controls, and drive motors too?

 

No, the ship kits + electronics includes the combat specific electronics. Meaning pump control board and gun firing board(s).

I'd love to offer that complete of a kit eventually, but we are not there yet.

 

Heres an update to my adventures with my two Vivedino Troodon printers that I bought, on a whim, from some old man in Michigan and dragged my Fiancé across the country to go pick up.

For reference, these are the printers I am talking about: VIVEDINO CORE XY Fully Enclosed 3D Printer

They are a clone of an older iteration of the VORON V2, I believe they were originally based on a V2.2 or 2.1. More information on the Voron Designs website here: VORON Design

I got these printers for $1000 for the two of them. A screaming deal. I entered into this expecting them to both be basket-cases and require a ton of work, but for $500 each they were worth it in the parts. Instead, I ended up with two printers that both worked just fine and embarked on a process of upgrades and fine-tuning.

One of the FIRST things I noticed with these printers was their hotends were woefully inadequate for their large build volume. They were using Dragon hotends without the higher flow heatbreak/heatblock, for some pretty pathetic flow rates. They also had some awful cable chain layout which needed to go.

Video of the extruder skipping trying to extrude at anything above about 15mm/s volumetric, and showing the awful drag chain: https://photos.app.goo.gl/tvA73M6JiomBVX1d7

The first thing I did was upgrade the printers with new toolheads based on the EVA carriage, specifically the EVA2 system. I needed to remix a bunch of parts to get it to work on these printers with their rail configuration and belt routing. (Link to the EVA project: EVA (eva-3d.page)) I set these new toolheads up with the original orbiter 1.5 extruders and new Phaetus Rapido UHF hotends with .6 CHT nozzles. Cooling is provided by a 5010 blower fan and a tri-horn cooling duct. It worked pretty good, but the "umbilical" to feed all the wires to the toolhead kinda sucked if I'm being honest. And the wire management at the toolhead itself was awful. BUT, the printers worked and their old Duet firmware exposed me to the wonders of web-browser based printer interface software.



https://photos.app.goo.gl/MdpSEg812nmGbLsMA

https://photos.app.goo.gl/5FqWfapnxE1mtobA7


A shortcoming of these printers was their size made it impossible to put them in my heated enclosure cabinet. In the winter, I started to have issues with layer delamination and cracking due to the temperature difference from the build plate to the top of the build chamber in my 30 degree garage. So I jury rigged some slightly dangerous chamber heaters, as discussed back in this post: https://rcwarshipcombat.com/threads...th-jersey-shipyards.446816/page-4#post-541111

This worked, but it wasn't great.



Lots of failed prints...



Finally, in January/Feb, I was done with the difficulties and decided to do something drastic.



I took one of the two printers and started a large upgrade project to convert them to klipper, convert their toolheads to CANBUS, and integrate the chamber heater control into the printer's firmware. As a side effect of this project, the Canbus boards (EBB36) on the toolhead incorporate an accelerometer which allows me to use input shaping to print faster with fewer artifacts.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/ZyF37Utd9uF729UdA

https://photos.app.goo.gl/1nu8bcKKF42Y2hMG9

https://photos.app.goo.gl/VxiWnVZFS18rYqWo6

As you can see, much less wire mess. The toolhead now only needs 4 wires to function, vs a 1.5" thick bundle.





Still need to tune some settings, but overall producing functional parts. My print settings generally are:

.4 layers, .6 line width, 200mm/s max print speed, 5000mm/s3 acceleration.
Cura's new advanced tree supports
2.4mm wall thickness
40% cubic subdivision infill
Input shaper auto-calibrated by klipper

As shown with the stringing/hairs in that last print, I need to go back and check out my retraction settings a bit to clean that up. The support material I purposefully under-extrude to save on plastic, which is why I dont really mind the voids/missing spots in that tree structure. So long as it reliably stays together to support my prints.

I then finally broke down and replicated the upgrades across to the second printer, now that SJS is up and running I really need the additional capacity:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/N3vkS7MKHsvFkz7g9

This forced me to re-learn what I had done to the first printer, and I learned some new things along the way about Klipper and the configurations for these printers. Like how to re-enable the stock LED lights! YAY! No more black and white timelapse at night!

I have more small upgrades in store for the printers. Like dedicated klipper cameras for monitoring and timelapses, in addition to filament runout prediction and AI spaghetti/failed print detection. I have new magnetic door latches on order as well....I'll finally be able to ditch the painters tape holding the doors closed.

Stay tuned for more.

 

So, official business announcements will take place in the vendor forum, but "in-development" sneak peak kinda stuff directly related to hulls will remain here.

I have started what I have been referring to as the cruiser blitz. SJS has a number of "pending" cruiser hulls that I am trying to push through for launch in december. I'll let you guys try and guess who's who of the pics below. This is 4 of the 6 I'd like to get done, if I have to compromise I'll settle for 4.

SJS has a cooperative program for those in the hobby with 3d modeling skills. If you have a hull you want turned into a kit, and you can provide a workable solid body model for said hull, I can go through whatever revisions are required to turn it into a kit for the store. As "payment", the contributor gets a ship kit of the ship that's been contributed. Some of these may look familiar to some of you because you're taking advantage of that program

EDIT:

The cruisers below are:

Graf Spee, Pensacola, Blucher, and Fargo




I would like to try and keep with a monthly release schedule for new hulls. The cruiser blitz will drop in December. After that, this is the currently tentative release schedule:

January: As-built Pennsylvania, Midway class CV, Whatever cruisers miss December
February: South Carolina, Texas (WW2 flavor)
March: Tiger
Eventually, before '24 NATs: Nagato (by request)

 

I see a little churman cruzer, ja!

 

Theres a pair of churmans jajajajaja

 

This is the latest long-ish term projection for what I envision for SJS's hull offerings catalog to be "complete."

I want to move through this list averaging at least 1 hull per month, until the list is finished.

Note that this is not set in stone and I am willing to listen to suggestions/requests. Things on this list can move in terms of priority at any time based on what I personally feel like working on at any given moment, and based on what people are willing to commit to with their wallets.

LINK

 

Wow ... someone's pretty ambitious there.

 

Derf and Bis I can provide hulls for already.

 

This is like an 18-24 month list, if worked to completion.

Since July SJS has expanded to 18~ hulls from an original launch of 4.

The design workflow has been refined and streamlined. My contractor(s) and I are really refining the practice of making these hulls.

My desire is to average a hull and a half a month.

My ultimate goal is to provide a spread of hulls encompassing all of the "useful" ships on our shiplist, with some specific requests sprinkled in to make things lively.

3d printing and on-demand manufacturing means I don't need to stock a warehouse full of molds to make all of these. I need to stock 5-6 wooden decks worth of each kit, and then raw materials.