3D printing


7

747flier

Well-Known Member
It has been pointed out that 3D printing might have a broader appeal than to just Narrow Gauge folks.

I don't claim to be an expert, but have worked with this for a few years, first in ship modeling and thence to Narrow Gauge rolling stock. I am traveling at the moment so don't have access to some of my info. The printers are getting better and better though it's not a push button technology quite yet. More of a witches art with regards to resins, supports and design. For printing rail cars, the size is such that one of the larger printers is necessary. Useful parts can be printed on smaller machines. This parts could be doors and windows, brake wheels and on and on. One gent on the net sells printed Narrow gauge pax car trucks, less wheels. These with the Kadee wheels roll even better than the Blackstones.

Building walls could be printed etc. However the big hangup for most people would be 3D design. Possibly not for the faint of heart, but I figured out the program "Design Spark mechanical" which is free but has some limitations. It works well for most railroad type projects.

WP 207 bag car.jpg
WP 218 Car.jpg

These are two of my White Pass and Yukon cars I created recently, mostly working from photos.

I will try to answer questions as I can and encourage discussion.

Tom
 
Where I came from before I started doing rail cars:

USS Caine (From Wouk's Caine Mutiny,) based on USS Zane which he served on in the great Pacific War, and Whitehurst, a reserve DE based out of Pier 91 in Seattle in the mid 60's.

With my design program, a little problematical designing the hulls, much better results could be achieved with say Fusion 360...
 
Before I do anything else I do want to complement you again on what I'm sure now are the double circle wrought iron ends on your interior benches. Great attention to detail, and that you 3D printed them (I assume?) is a good example of what these tools are capable of.

Rather than Fusion 360, the package I'm actually looking at is Shapr3D, which runs about $230/yr (the free version is for tryout purposes only) and/or your still free DSM, even though with a feature or two now removed on the latest version.

Which begs the question: What are you using yourself as far as actual design tools? Touchpad and mouse or pen while looking at a monitor, or perhaps even a touchscreen? I'm back to square on on that here--I bought a Wacom medium sized touchpad, which comes with a good pen, but I never really got started with it because it had an unchargeable battery (so I returned it to Amazon for a refund). I do have a big 4K monitor right in front of me here, so I anticipated only a short familiarization process--it's easy enough to use a mouse...but I never got to that point in my self-training, hence the return to square one.

Strictly speaking I know the pen isn't necessary if one is reasonably competent with a mouse, and I've had experience with Blender too, so cranking out the designs will not be a show stopper at all.*

*Unlike my still ongoing issues with correctly sizing the 2D prints on my printer! I've found a workaround, but it's tedious. Meh....]

Anyway, this thread should give us a good start and a broader focus. And not take over your WP&Y narrow gauge 3D printing thread.
 
I haven't used a drawing pad for 3D, mostly as there isn't much to any freehand involved in what I do. Draw a box to extrude into a cube for instance, DSM allows you to specify the dimensions exactly, so all you need to do is draw the rectangle and type in the exact dimensions, then pull an extrusion, again to an exact amount.

First thing is to learn to design, then with printer and resins one uses the slicer to finalize for printing. DSM, the free version lacks one very important item, a mirror function. The Chitubox slicer has various scaling and mirroring functions. One can exactly rescale an item by either percent or an exact dimensions, equally or by each axis. Various resins have a shrinkage factor on drying and curing,

It is common, even with some experience to design things that don't print properly, the most common error is to design railings etc too fine. In the slicing the orientation and supporting is another thing. My experience has been that I may go through several iterations before arriving at the best item.
 
Wouk. That has to be Herman Wouk, and while I've never read "The Caine Mutiny," I did read his "The Winds of War," condensed version in--you guessed it--Reader's Digest Condensed Books.

Your models are cutting edge, certainly. I'm hard pressed to think of any modeling challenge this hobby could throw your way that you couldn't handle, just looking at these two models. I'll keep my ace-in-the-hole idea--making barbed wire fence in N scale--in my back pocket for now.

"Caine" based off Zane: A quick look shows Zane as a four-stacker, similar to another, and more famous member of the Clemson class, the "Reuben James." Given that Caine is fictional, was there any particular ship you used as a reference to build this (these) models?
 
Zane with almost all the other four pipers lost a boiler and gained more fuel capacity when they were converted to Destroyer Mine Sweepers. So both Zane and Caine were three pipers. Caine is closely based on USS Zane, Whitehurst is in 1945 fit, post Pearl Harbor rebuild after a kamikaze. I haven't as yet produced her cable spools which supplanted the torpedo tubes.
 
In Wouk's book he describes many scenes aboard Caine, which essentially means that he just changed the name of Zane to Caine. From the available info his descriptions match Zane exactly.

A beauty of designing and building rail cars is they are a more finite project than a ship which can easily have several hundred components to design and build. For instance the DE in the photo still lacks main deck lifelines, rigging and the unique electrical power spools. After Kamikaze damage off Leyte she was converted to having capability of being a floating power station, since she was a turbo-electric drive. Reduction gearing was a major bottleneck in ship construction and various means were utilized to avoid their necessity, such as turbines driving generators with propulsion motors, Jeep carriers with UnInflow triple compound steam piston engines and of course Diesel's.
 

The funny bit there ^ is that the name of the printing company seems to be "CADMicroSolutionsInc"

If the company designs and builds CAD buildings or somesuch, then, yes. This might be "micro" for them, but it's a just a tad bit large for us N-scalers.

I'm trying to figure out what the object might be...in G scale. Perhaps some part for a G scale orbiter.
 
@Vince-RA: Elegoo released their new 12K about a week later than Anycubic with the m5s. They use a lot of the same basic parts, but the Elegoo is currently $499. Of COURSE Anycubic just kicked their new m5s up to $499 too, so as far as price goes, buying ahead of time just saved me (and you too) $100.

"Vogman" over at YouTube" just put up his own comparison video, and he favors the Anycubic printer so far (he's used both).


I've found his videos to be pretty worthwhile in the past, so I hope he's right here too.
 
"Building walls could be printed etc. However the big hangup for most people would be 3D design.'

Was at a recent local NMRA show and tell. There were two buildings on display. The owner relayed how the walls were 3D printed and then adhered to a plexiglass box. The plexiglass served two purposes; first as a reinforcing structure to the four 3D printed walls, and second the plexiglass provided the window glass for the structures. Pretty cool idea.
 
It's a good idea as thinner walls might not retain a good straight shape. Plexi is very flat and makes a better window material than thin acetate etc. I made much of the superstructure of my 1:192 USS Alaska CB1 as well as the main battery turrets. Maybe today I would print some of these items. Much of the smaller items are printed from directors to secondary battery and AA armament.
 
boatwrench said:
"Building walls could be printed etc. However the big hangup for most people would be 3D design.'

Was at a recent local NMRA show and tell. There were two buildings on display. The owner relayed how the walls were 3D printed and then adhered to a plexiglass box. The plexiglass served two purposes; first as a reinforcing structure to the four 3D printed walls, and second the plexiglass provided the window glass for the structures. Pretty cool idea.
Click to expand...
I just referred to this same video


in the "coloring rocks thread," Here brick building guru John Nehrich shows his basic techniques beginning @24:54. John is speaking with Allen Keller, (formerly? not sure, but I think he was an editor at Model Railroader at one point). It's pretty easy to follow, I think, and the basic idea of cutting window openings and how to do it fast is pretty good. It wouldn't work over an acrylic base though.

One note here: Holgate and Reynolds brick sheet measured about 17" x 12", IIRC, and was, indeed, a thin vinyl sheet. It was aimed originally at professional architectural model builders, I think, but, as with so many other MRR staples, was picked up for our model building use here in this hobby. The size of the bricks was quite close to HO scale, and you glued it down using contact cement, so it was pretty quick and easy to crank out structures.

I was trying to find it again recently, but unfortunately it seems the embossing masters were destroyed in a fire, so it's passed on into history <sniff>.

One of my own thoughts with this new 12K printer I just bought is to see if I can make something similar for N scale (no reason the same printer couldn't be used for HO scale sheets too...IF it can be done at all. The speed of printing with this new model could make cranking out the sheets go pretty quickly, provided detail isn't lost too much--a single printer "print farm" of its own, so to speak.

As far as mastering the brick designs: That should go quite quickly, I would think, using any number of the design software tools we have today. In my case, I drew up some (pen and ink on vellum) masters way back in the 80's. A couple of different brick patterns, patio brick and even diamond plate for making (etching in brass back then) for diesel locomotive walkways, etc.

I have those scans on this PC, I know, so I'll toss 'em up shortly (I declare them open source--free to use).
 
Easy enough to design and print doors and windows. Brick per se mostly not applicable to an Alaska Railroad, we don't have the clays fro manufacture of bricks and transport not practical. Bricks used in chimneys but not much of anything else.

Interesting video! Thanks:
 
Ok, some masters I drew up many years ago: ink on vellum drawings from the late eighties. Once again, I declare them Open Source--free for use:
 

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Nice art work! Though dome 3D design programs allow importation of .JPG files, they are for entertainment purposes only as far as I know, one has to trace over them. If someone knows how to directly activate them, would like to know!

Cheers: Tom
 
Wah Hail: Despite it taking forever to print (22 hours) I decided to print some flat car frame vertically to avoid the warping that happens when printed horizontally (flat). Not finished as yet and I hope to get two out of the four, but I realized after I hit the print button that more supports were needed to prevent lateral disruption of a tall skinny print.

These are specifically designed to incorporate a steel bar stock in the space between the truck bolsters to achieve a reasonable weight.
 
After a few false starts with other programs, I finally made some progress with OpenSCAD. There is no visual editor, it's all done with math and a basic programming language, which suits me pretty well. First attempt at a tank car body:

tank_draft.png

Nowhere near ready to start printing but it's fun to get something that looks like something I care about!
 
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