Other 3D Printing Experiments

Bulleid Coach

This is my trial Bulleid coach body. One was printed horizontally and the other vertically. There is more stepping in the surface of both versions than I am prepared to accept so I am treating this as unsuccessful. I will now revert to my previous plan to produce etched sides.

Tender Chassis

I have received my first attempt at the etched parts for my tender chassis. There was some shrinkage in the 3D parts so I will revise the etched parts to elongate the holes allowing the frames to be trimmed to fit. There was more shrinkage in the FUD than the plastic so the assembly shown below used the black plastic version.

The wheels are Ultrascale P4 12mm diameter 10 spoke. The split axles are Branchlines 2mm diameter. We do not have 10 spoke wheels in our 3mm finescale range.

You can just see the beam on the underside view. The chassis fits the David Andrews E1 and N tenders and, with a modification for the lower footplate, it will also fit the U. It is desgned for split axle pickup and a sound decoder and speaker will fit in the tender body. The holes in the water tank are intended to let the sound out. I don't know if they are strictly necessary.

The tender frames are the correct profile for these tenders. The 3D centre correctly represents the water tank and front and rear framing.

More 3D Printing - 13 September 2014

We produced the columns for John Bateman's Midland Bank frontage at Wadebridge.

We are working on brick reveals for the windows and doors in a row of terraced houses in Wadebridge. The bricks are chamferred on the corners so cannot be done easily in etch. John is producing the rest of the brickwork in etch.

We have also produced the gears and running wheels for the Wadebridge engine hoist. The wax residue needs cleaning from them before they will photograph at all well. This FUD material is not easy to photograph or see properly in its raw state.

I have recently followed Robert Doberski's example and bought Cubify Design for my 3D drawing. This is much easier to use for 3D than TurboCAD Deluxe although the jury is still out on whether I will use it for etching artwork. I will also have to decide whether to redraw all my 3D TurboCAD artwork.

I am working on Fox bogie sideframes to fit the MJT bogies. I have saved my work in progress to HTML. I don't know if I can upload that here.

Swanage Weighbridge Office - 15 June 2019

This is my first experiment printing bricks using my Anycubic Photon printer. Drawing the whole office as a single part crashed Cubify Design. The first idea was to print separate interlocking layers as shown below. However the interface between layers does not look precise enough. A better solution looks like drawing the layers as separate parts and then using the Design Assembly tool to join them into a single model.

The cement courses are drawn 0.125mm wide and 0.25mm deep. Humbrol brick colour was applied with a brush and left for a few days to dry. This was following with matt white wiped off with kitchen towel.

The cement courses proved easier to fill than in my etched brickwork where the half etch courses are restricted to a depth of 0.125mm.