@IanL1
It may be worth rapidly documenting my experience with more sophisticated modelling tools ? Ask any further questions about them...
1 - I have a Seig C3 Arc Euro 7x14 Chinese lathe (Arc Euro now closed down, but 7x14 Chinese lathes are readily available). Lathes are messy and noisy machines, so I use it in an outside shed workshop. For boats, I make prop tube bearings, shafts and motor connectors on it. You need to learn how to use a lathe, and it's useful to have a tap/die set, a quick-change tool mount and a tailstock die holder. It works well.
2 - I have an eShapeoko CNC cutter - made up from a kit by Amber Spyglass
https://amberspyglass.co.uk . The machine is slightly noisy but quite clean, so I use it in an attic workshop in the house. I made a kit up because an important feature of a cnc cutter is the base size, which limits what you can make. I wanted to cut keels and side skins for model boats, so I ordered one with a 1m 'Y' axis. You can get up to 1.5m as standard from Amber. It was the cheapest way I could find to obtain a machine which was suitable for model boat parts in sizes I wanted to make.
To make it up you need to be used to Meccano-type assembly and electronic soldering. You then need to learn to use a 2-d drafting package, save the result in GCode format and use the open source Gcode Sender to send instructions to the cutter. The Amber cutter frame can hold anything - laser cutters, milling tools or other cutters such as a vinyl knife - I use a small high-speed router bought off ebay for about £20.
Holding work firmly on the base is important. I mainly cut balsa sheets for my EeZeBilt boats and have made up a jig which holds 36"x4" balsa sheets. The whole process works well.
3 - I have a Elegoo Saturn 4 Ultra Resin 3-D printer. It is a quiet but messy and slightly smelly machine, which is kept in a dedicated bedroom in the house (on a melamine easy-clean table). I used to have a Phrozen Sonic resin printer - and found that it was hard to set up and the prints would often fail. Eventually the LCD screen ( a critical part that has a shortish life) wore out and I got the Saturn. This is a much better machine, easy to set up and prints rarely fail.
To use it you need to learn to use a 3-D drafting package, then save the output in .STL format and pass it to a 'slicing' package (usually Chitubox) to create the instructions for the cutter. The parts are built onto a metal base which is repeatedly lowered into a bath of resin where layers are repeatedly added. When finished, you have to lever the sticky piece off the base, wash it in alcohol and put it in a UV enclosure to harden. This can be messy and smelly. The parts are made with fine detail, and the machine is suitable for making parts from about 1mm up to 150mm. Typically prints take an hour or so.
4 - I also have a Bambu Lab P1S (actually, my son's) sitting next to the Elegoo Saturn. This is a filament printer which works by moving a print-head over the metal base and squirting a tiny drop of melted plastic into position. This is less messy, but takes a longer time than a resin system - typically several hours. You use the same software to create a drawing and generate instructions for the machine, but you do not need to wash and harden the end product. It is more suitable for making parts with less detail but greater size - perhaps 30mm up to 300mm.
Each machine is optimal for its own specific application, but I find that I use the resin printer most often. It is ideal for model boat fittings from 1/4" to 6" in size, and can produce detail smaller than I can easily see.
For any specialist machine you need to learn how to operate it. But you do not necessarily have to learn how to draw up the parts you wish to make. You can download 3-D drawings off the net, either free or at a price. For EeZeBilt boats, my web site contains both free downloads for 3-D resin model boat fittings, and free downloads of the 2-D cnc cutting paterns for cutting the wood for model boat kits. My aim is that, with suitable modern machinery, anyone who wants an EeZeBilt kit that was available in the UK in the 1960s will be able to buy some wood, download the data from my site, and recreate their own kit at home...
