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Stour Valley Dream - more station building and a few clamps

Fen End Pit

Entry posted by Fen End Pit

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I decided to give the 3D printer a little job and modeled up some right angle magnetic clamps. These have 4 strong magnets mounted into them and while obviously of no use for anything 'hot' for holding two pieces at right angles while they glue they could come in handy. I'll put the .STL files on the thingiverse if anyone is interested, I made too different sizes, one 50mm and the other 30mm.

 

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They proved to be very useful when assembling walls of my station building toilet block.

 

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This was cut in two layers of 1.5mm MDF.

 

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I managed to cut the quoins for the main building out of thin 160gsm (200 micron) postcard card. These did tend to come out a bit like a cake doily and were very fragile, once you have 'half cuts' for the brick joints there is a risk of them falling apart before you can stick them on. I sprayed the main 3mm MDF walls with a Halford's red oxide paint to seal them before adding another coat of Humbrol  Matt 70 brick red. The centre parts were masked and then the edges sprayed with Matt 83 which was also sprayed on the quoin 'doilies'. Before assembly I rubbed some Wilko fine filler into the brick joints and brushed with Vallejo grey model wash.

 

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I am amazed by how fine the laser cutter can cut 1mm MDF, the glazing bars on the windows come out at about .45mm and I was able to paint them with the light green edging, though it is virtually invisible in the photographs. I will be painting the window sills in this colour to match the colour photograph I have from about earlier 60s'.

 

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The windows are not stuck in yet and the roof needs a little work to fit better. I used the 'engrave' operation on the cutter to take the surface of the lower pane of the window back before cutting but I think I need to cut it back a little more so that the lower pane seems to slide behind the upper pain. I've found that with care I can just shave a British Standard Gnats off the central glazing bar to improve the look but this is not for the faint hearted!

 

I have a little fettling of the platform to do to make the hole the building fits into right.

 

As a bit of a break from CAD and the lasercutter, (the 3mm MDF brickwork took about 90 minutes to cut, the quoin card nearly 30 minutes) I made up a facing point lock for the Cavendish end of the loop. Now I have to do a detector for the ground disc, but that probably comes when I start worrying about signal cabling.

 

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Thanks for your interest.

 

David

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Dave Holt

David,

The clamps look very useful and you've obviously put them to good use straight away. The station building is coming along nicely.

I take it the facing point lock is going to be hidden under a protective ramp, or are you going to use the detailed Ambis locking unit?

Dave.

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