Painter's Fortress Vol. 2

Painter's Fortress Vol.2 is a  3D printable solution to all your painting gears storage. It has all the painting storage you can expect from a paint station,  and his thought to be:

• Complete
• sturdy
• fashionable
• fully modulable
• support free
• Optimized for no PLA Waste!
  
  
   

We are trying to guess what you must be thinking, but we do think that for now you are split between the fact that it looks cool, that it should take a lot of filament to 3D print, and that you already have something to store your paint on your Desk.

You are definitely right.

But who wants something to store paint on his desk, when he can have something fully adapted to his paints, with no space lost, a lot of different trays to answer different needs, a sturdy and easy to print solution, and no plastic waste, and that looks cool?

That's all the philosophy behind this Painter's Fortress.

Now with the Vol.2, we went further. Magnets, new sizes, new sliders... Get ready to get the ultimate paint station!

We are hobbyist, specialist in assembling minis, painting, and reaching out of our daily life through our passion. And so, with Fer, my partner from Bad Monkey 3D prints, we wanted to be sure that our paint station shared the same spirit. It's not a simple tool, it becomes a part of our hobby space.

The Vol.1 was a great success! It created a huge community exchanging on our discord.

First, we want to thank that community for their awesome support and returns! We never thought that this product will create such a wave!

So with a community, comes a lot of request, of ideas, and of evolutions. And we decided to follow most of them. Now the KS includes more than 1 000 files!

The main changes are :

• use of the same design for all cubes, based on the 200x200x200 cube with rails
• a LOT of new sizes (150mm,100mm)
• magnets for the deco panels, magnets between cubes
• new slider models, punched, lipped, and back added
• new mini, brush, phone,... and base sliders
• new drawers based on the slider system, with system for adding compartments
• wet palette compatible with Red Grass Games wet palette v1 accessories.
  ...
  
   

As you can see, this is really worth its content!

This includes all the files, except for the theme elements that are added separately and the new optional front stand.

Which means you can find everything you need for your home paintstation with those.

Is it easy to print? 

In short, Yes. We decided after a huge number of trials (and failure) to print all the parts flat on the 3D printer, and to assemble them. Printing in "3D" proved to be more prone to failure, and also less resistant than a simple "flat" print. The only element that is not printed flat is the drawers.

We recommend that you print the miniatures on a PLA printer, with a favor to PLA + (we did our tries with PLA+ and PLA Meta from SUNLU) or prusament (it's what has been used for that awesome stone effect you see in the pictures).  Resin printer won't do any good, as resin doesn't show the flexibility level that PLA does.

All the designs were tested on a Custom Ender 3, equivalent of a ender 3 S1 and on a Prusa MK4.

We also used 10 awesome backers of Vol.1 to test our designs with their own printer. 

A 220x220 bed is perfect to print all parts. Most parts on full bed takes around 6 hours to print with good quality settings.

Before printing,  we recommend that you print our test slot sample, to verify if your 3D printer is well calibrated.  All the parts were thought to be assembled using a hammer if printed on an ender 3 or equivalent, or using corners to maintain while gluing for prusa and equivalent. We kept the sturdiness, and sides are thick enough to resist the shock. 

the corner bracket we used is here thingiverse.com/thing:2797757  
the short screws and pads are here thingiverse.com/thing:16730301
I recommend printing those in PETG for long last use :)

We printed in .30 with the prusa and .24 with the ender 3, both with a .4 nozzle. The way the system and the nozzle work makes it impossible to have the same exact dimensions between printers, so we adapted our system to work with all. 

All parts are 4mm thick (we've been trying everything from 2mm to 6mm, and 4mm has proven to be the perfect ratio). Assembly is made with a hammer, to be sure all is nicely connected.

We made a lot of tests to define also what would be the best structure for the walls, to ensure sturdiness, but also to limit the quantity of PLA used. We also wanted to keep the nice look of it all. And this is all you get.  

We tested every part to check if it was acting as desired. The drawers slide well, are optimized to ensure that you can put inside as many stuff as possible, and also we add the opportunity to change your level regarding what you want to put inside the drawers, to ensure that you can fill them as much as possible - no  space lost.

We also did opening/close tests, removing/adding space, to be sure it all goes smoothly. I think I never spent more time in my life crash testing a thing I 3D printed! 

This version is 100 times more modular than the previous one, and on many levels.

Elements
First, the V2 has 3 depth proposed in standard : 200mm, 150mm, 100mm. If your office doesn't have much place, you can still put a paint station.

All elements use disc magnets of 10mm by 2mm to connect to each other. the same system is also used to connect the themes panels, but with disc magnets of 10mm by 1mm.

The basic elements are as such :

cubes, the primary of the set
stairs, that can be put over the cubes
corner, that helps you orientate your paint system on a 30° angle
corner stairs, to put over them
stairs top, if you want to go up on the wall.
The choices in widths, depths, heights, and combinations can be resumed in that table:

As you can see, some combinations are not possible, because the space allowed was not big enough to get an acceptable result. So we decided to go without, instead of proposing something of lower quality.

Content elements / cubes and corners
All content elements use the rail system that was only proposed on the 200x200x200 cube in V1. 

All inside elements use the slider system that was used in the same cube. Elements can be :

• Simple sliders
  Paint bottle sliders
• Paint tubes sliders
• miniatures with magnets sliders (25mm space between small magnets)
• miniatures sliders for round and square base (max 60mm)
• bases 45° stands for round and square bases (max 60mm)
• a wet palette
• a phone/tablet stand
• drawers with modular separators
• Paint bottle sliders

Paint bottle sliders exist in 3 different models : 

• standard, that just have a small shape on the slider
• punched, to put your bottle upside down
• lipped so that you get a little 3mm border to keep the bottle in place

Note : regarding the model of the bottle, not all options are always available because sometimes it just doesn't make sense)

Sliders for bottle are made for:

• standard droppers, 
• vallejo droppers and similar,
• GW bottles and similar,
• pro acryl bottles and similar,
• daler rowney + vallejo metal bottles and similar,
• kimeira bottles and similar,
• we also have something made to arrange many molotow tubes.

Paint tubes sliders
Paint tubes sliders adapts to most size to store your tubes of paints

Base 45° stand slider
The base 45° stand slider can be use to prepare bases in advance and store them, or to showcase contrast paint results

Wet Palette slider
The wet palette is compatible with RGG V1 wet palette equipments, magnetised and deep enough for a good seal.

Drawers
Lastly, the drawers got huge improvements too. Now we have different heights :

• 28 mm (added for stairs but can be also used everywhere)
• 42 mm
• 52 mm
• 71 mm
• 90 mm
• 187 mm

Also every drawer rely on the slider system. so you can move them from a cube from same width and depth to another without any problem. All themes assets in front are also magnetised. 

There are many accessories to use in the drawers, such as:

• brushes rack
• molotow rack
• tubes rack
• 45° stands (for base)
• And we have also compartment that can split your drawer according to your needs in many or few sub drawers, very easily.

All has been made with modularity in mind. The limit is the sky :)

Here are some examples of what people did with the Vol.1 :

Regarding the space you have, regarding what you need to store, the best is to plan, print,  and set! Each painter is unique, each desk is unique...  

We tried to take all major paints into account. There are:

• Standard droppers
• GW pots (all)
• Green Stuff World Droppers
• AK droppers
• AK Bottles/MIG Bottles
• Vallejo/army Painter Droppers
• Scale 75 Droppers
• Molotow recharge
• Kimeira pots
• Liquitex inks
• Golden Droppers
• The army painters droppers
• Standard 20ml tubes (for oil paint or Scale 75, or abteilung)
• P3 pots
• Darkstar droppers
• Proacryl droppers
• 2 thin coat droppers
• ...
  
  The Vol.2 comes with free gifts that were requested by previous backers of the Vol.1 :

A wetpalette that is compatible with the RGG V1 foam and sheets and is magnetised to fit the Painter's Fortress on a slider.

2 different brush stands (the second one is also magnetized to be pulled on top of a cube roof)


Tablet and phone holder (that can be used solo, or on a slider)