On another tangent

Thinking about potential layout designs has not been my only task of late. I've been working with Pat Lana, owner of the Crandic (Model RR) to build a 3D printed model of his Dad's old 1959 Ford FC-150 truck. It took a while, bu in chunks of spare time, I did put together a CAD model of the FC-150, extended it to many of the other variants offered, and delivered prototypes to Pat last fall. Pat took the prototypes and prepped and painted them. He hopes to have an autorack full of them on his railroad. He sent me this picture so that you can get the idea.

Pat's picture shows the as printed model on the left, followed by the cleaned model, a primed model in grey, and 3 painted variations - all around a penny. This is N-scale remember! In addition, I have made and printed additional variants that Pat wanted.

So, with all these variants around, and others asking about it - I decided to open a Shapeways shop. The Model Works at Otowi Station. Eventually, it will get its own blog, but it has a logo. The logo depicts a D&RGW engine at Denver's Union Station, with the image starting as a pencil sketch, becoming a more detailed blue print, to a rough color drawing, a detailed color image, to a photo of the real thing. Kind of a description of designing for 3D printing.

Okay, so if you follow the link, it says coming soon. But that is largely because I have been working on a few more products first. Specifically, I have been developing a T-gauge (1:450) train station and a set of modular wall components. The train station is fantastic, and printed successfully and even includes interior furniture! More on T-gauge in another post, but if you are curious, check out this site.

The station comes in kit form, and printed perfectly the first time. I just need to paint and assemble it now. But, the other project is more pressing. I got the most recent prototypes, generation 3, which finally looked promising enough to finish. As I went, I documented my process. Here are the parts as delivered.

So, here are the parts so far as delivered. We have a solid brick wall, a wall with a standard door, a wall with two doors, and a wall with a freight door. I plan on offering these and several more variants, but the walls are designed with a region where doors and or windows can be cut out of the material so as to obtain exactly the desired spacings.  In addition, the walls come with beveled edges, with brickwork to the edge, or with spots for pilasters to cover the edges of the neighboring sections. Right now I have 90-degree (outside corner) and 180-degree (inline walls) versions ready, but I will also make 45-, 135-, 225-, and 270-degree versions, along with walls that will be the correct length for 45-degree angle walls. Walls will also come in multiple widths and as multiple story units. There will also eventually be roof details, as well as window and door units to fit my standard size holes. Part of the beauty of this is that while I have selected one brick pattern initially, I can actually replicate other patterns. So, this should be a fantastic modular wall product. At least I think so. I still need to figure out pricing, because to get satisfactory bricks in N-scale, I did have to go to a Frosted Ultra Detail print style.

I cleaned the parts with Bestine (i.e. Hexane) for 15 minutes. Then I allowed them to dry. Next, I put the parts in an ultrasonic jewelry cleaner for a 6 minute cycle and allowed them to dry again. Afterwards, the parts became quite white instead of nearly transparent. You can see that in the picture to the right, which was taken after the Bestine soak, but before the ultrasonic cleaning.


At this point, once dry, I primed the parts with light coats of Rust-oleum Paint + Primer. I picked the Cinnamon color as being fairly brick-like. I did two coats on each side allowing the parts to dry between coats.

 First Coat.

After the Last Coat and drying.

You can see the brick work already popping after the final coat. I thought about stopping here, but decided to try the trick of dry-brushing titanium white into the mortar lines. In this case, these lines are less than 0.1mm thick (5/8" in N-scale). Even lines this fine are technically out of scale, but this is quite comparable to the lines on the other modular wall products in N-scale.

At this point, the brickwork pops - probably too much, but some weathering will take care of that. You can really see the offsets between brick courses much better now. So, it came time to put these walls together. If you look at the walls carefully, you will notice that I have a mixture of edges. Some have brickwork to the edge and a 45-degree chamfer on the back. Others have a recess without and brickwork to accept a pilaster. My goal of the test was to build  wall section - 90-degree edge - wall section - 180-degree mate - wall section - 90-degree edge - wall section. So the back would remain open, but I could experiment with the 90-degree and 180-degree pilasters, and the 90-degree mate without a pilaster. I used CAA to glue the parts together. Here are the results.

I think they look pretty good. However, can you see my one assembly mistake? In the second picture above? It is easier from this view.

I attached the second wall on the right, upside down. This is the solid brick wall, and you can tell it is upside down because the framed area on the inside represents the space for doors and windows cutouts to be arranged. But from the outside, no problem. In fact, the project looked so good at this point, I decided to add a roof.

The roof is a simple piece of cardstock, with some ultrafine sandpaper on top. I think it looks really very good. The model will look better with some weathering, doors, and roof details. But those are all next. Right now, I am quite pleased with how the models have come out. Once I work out a reasonable pricing structure, I plan to add these to the shop with the FC-150s and open it up for business. In the meantime, I have a few other ideas on the back burner for the shop. Watch here for a grand opening notice!

Okay, with this out of the way, I am going to try to get back to discussing plans. But, I decided to take this detour because I have started to look at 3D printing as a means to work out some design issues I am seeing in my plans. So, I will come back to 3D printing as a planning tool at some point. 

Next up in my concept discussions is a subtle shift from N to Nn3 - still N-scale, but now with a modeling focus on the Narrow Gauge D&RGW and associated lines.