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Does my chassis look big in this?

Pugsley

Entry posted by Pugsley

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As a further distraction from the 37 bogie project, I thought I'd do a little more to the chassis for the Nitric Acid tanks. I'm using Alibre design for this as well, which has a sheet metal function, that calculates fold sizes and the half etched fold areas based on the parameters I specify. It's taken a while to get my head round, purely because there's so much it can do, and I'm not really familiar with CAD, so I'm very much learning as I go along.

 

There's a few hours work gone into this so far, it would have been quicker apart from the sharp learning curve, so I've redone a few things several times to get where I am now.

 

blogentry-6668-0-96458900-1319989056_thumb.jpg

 

It's just the outer members at the moment, the next thing I'm going to draw up and add to the assembly are the axleguards (W-Irons), I've just got to work out a foolproof way of locating them, which I think is going to involve etching through and using Scale Hardware cosmetic rivets. All other solebar rivets will be of the usual half etched and punched through variety.

 

Although this is going to be mostly etched, I'm planning on making as much use of castings as I can, in order to reduce construction time and complexity. I'm aiming for a compromise between the JLTRT speed and ease of assembly and the MMP looks and details. Only time will tell if I can manage it!

 

Everything appears to look OK size wise at the moment, I've scaled the buffers down and fitted them virtually. They're the right distance apart (scale 1727mm) and there's only a tiny bit of bufferbeam visible on the outer edges, just like the prototype, so I'm happy.

 

More as and when...

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lyneux

Sheet metal function looks great. I'm watching the Alibre videos at the moment with a view to using it for my JHA. I'm really lacking this feature through using Blender.

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Pugsley

I'm finding it really useful, one thing to watch is that I don't think the sheet metal function comes with the Personal Edition of Alibre. It's a great program once you get into it, I've picked it up quite quickly.

 

I weighed up the options and in the end I thought that the saving in time was worth the extra expense. I think it was, but I'll only find that out when I get the frets back from the etchers, which seems a long way off yet!

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lyneux

Which edition did you get? The pricing is not obvious from their website for the Pro and Expert versions. The only other thing that puts me off is lack of a Mac version (but I can run it in an VM layer in Windows).

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Pugsley

It's the Pro version that I've got.

 

One problem is that they won't let you buy it direct from them is the US, you have to use one of the UK resellers, links to both can be found on the Alibre website. If you are looking to get it, keep an eye on the main site as they frequently have special offers and the UK resellers have to follow the same deals. I can't remember the exact saving when I got my copy, but it was something like 20% off - I dealt with Draughtmark and they were quite helpful, but I didn't feel that they added any value for their cut though.

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Pugsley

It is pricey, but you have to remeber you're getting something that is pretty much comparable with Solidworks - now that really is expensive! Keep an eye out for the offers, you should be able to get it for under £600, I did.

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