British Steam Gun Boat for Cruel Seas

Here is the latest addition to my Cruel Seas collection, a Steam Gun Boat (SGB). The British had 7 of these built between 1940 and 1942, originally intended for escorting the North Sea convoys, but ended up being based in the Channel.

I've been really interested to see the large number of suitable ships out there designed for 3D printing, especially covering those not available from Warlord. I wanted another escort for my British fleet and really fancied the SGB, but I don't have a 3D printer. Looking around online there are various companies that will print your files for you, with prices ranging from very expensive to quite cheap. The best deal I found was Treatstock, which is an umbrella company who take your order and deal with the payment, then pass your order on to a more local, small business to print it and post to the buyer. So I downloaded the file from Wargaming 3D and placed my order for printing.

A couple of weeks later, the boat turned up in the post. The printer had been in touch a couple of times to discuss a couple of small problems before printing, he was worried that the gun barrels were too fragile and might break off. I said to go ahead, if they did break I could easily fix that with a bit of brass wire and this was really an experiment on my part anyway. In the end all the barrels remained intact.

So here are some pictures, firstly straight out of the bag.

Then with a light grey spray undercoat.

And the finished result, it could probably do with another wash of dirty rust, it looks a bit too clean still in the pictures.

With a couple or Warlord plastic models from the starter set for scale.

So what are my thoughts? I was really pleased with the model, some of the detail is not as crisp as the resin & metal models from Heroics and Ros or the Warlord plastics, but perfectly adequate for a 1:300 wargaming model.

Good value, considering it's quite a big beast, slightly longer that a Fairmile D. It cost £9.60 including shipping, so that was about £6 for the boat. That compares nicely with £5.50 for a Fairmile from H&R and much better that £15 for a Fairmile from Warlord. Obviously it would have been even more economical to have bought 3 or 4 boats in one order, as the postage would have been the same, but this was a trial run for me, in future I'll order several boats at once.

The process itself was good, very easy to upload the file to the Treatstock website. I was then offered a variety of printers and their respective charges to chose from. I went for Seaside 3D because I had read a good review of their quality, but there were some even cheaper printers available. I may give one of those a try in future.
Communication through out the process was excellent as well.

I will definitely be getting some more 3D printed models. Will I be getting my own printer? Not at list stage, I know printing my own models would bring the cost down to pennies each, but I don't see myself getting enough use to warrant the investment in a machine. Of course that may change in the future.

After being directed to some superb contemporary images of SGBs, I've added a camouflage scheme.