JCL

Morning @Clem, I didn't realise I still had anything up on Shapeways - it's their regular price rises that led me to buy my own machine. I'm just off the west coast of Canada, so I'm a bit out the way, but If it helps, I also uploaded the sides onto Thingiverse where anyone can download them for free and print them: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3062866 . The file includes buffers as they have a step on the top of them. Maybe give Gary @Knuckles a shout as he does commissions sometimes. I've some photos as well. If you're interested, send me your email address in a DM and I'll send them to you.

Completely agree with @GWR57xx, I've had to use them a couple of times over the years and their support has been first class.

You are a man of great resolve! The others have given great advice, so I hope it works well for you.

Hi there, there are definitely a number of trade-offs. Printing a model all in one go can be a bonus for some, as it saves time later. However, on the down-side, a lot of material can be wasted creating all the supports that are needed - especially in resin printers. In fact, you could use more material in the supports than in the actual model. Getting the best finish out of the printer means getting to know it really well. Mike's prints are a world away from the ones he made just after buying his printer, mine are too. Finishing depends on a lot of factors that are determined when creating the file for the printer. These include layer height and print speed, but can also include material temperature (and temperature consistency), material quality, and even vibrations from not having a stable base for the printer. I've found a video recently of someone who even swears that the concrete paver under his printer makes a huge difference to print quality. Definitely in this case, kit form is the way to go. Mike Trice also found creating a carriage in kit form with the sides printed separately was the way to go with Shapeways. I also think one of the possible dangers of 3D printing can be getting carried away and forgetting that the insides of some of these models need painting and such. In other words - I generally agree

You're not wrong. I've done a few locos and such in the past few years, and I have to agree that I find them a bit of a bind at times. I've one more I'm going to start soon, but nothing else planned. As you say, I'm finding the buildings to be more fun - partly as there's more leeway.

In the end, I thought I'd give the print another go almost as-is. The two changes I made were to remove the chimney pots, and to increase the base lift height from 1mm to 1.2mm. Doing this increased the print time from 12 hours to 17 hours, but it came out a lot better. I'm not bothered about the first 1mm as that will be hidden in the scenery. Anyway, all was going well, I washed it down and attacked it with the air compressor to clean it off. Unfortunately I hadn't thought too deeply about that porch. The bleedin' thing was a tiny canister of resin, and as soon as I lifted the house off the plate, the sun came out from behind a cloud, it poured out of the porch, and parts of the building were covered in the resin that cured immediately! Luckily, most of the affected bits are at the bottom of the building, so I might get away with bit of judicious gardening.

Interesting, on Shapeways, it's $90 in that grainy material, $609 in fine detail plastic and $80 in sandstone. Unfortunately I couldn't get a price in platinum.

I did think about it, but was too eager to give it a go. It went wrong within the first 30 minutes, so I’m going to set it off again today, and then hang around for an hour. If it messes up again, I’ll split it up this evening. Looking at resin volume, it cost $3 (about £2 I think), later, out of idle curiosity, I’ll see if Shapeways will accept it and find out how much it would cost on there.

I've finished the resin part of the station. You can see on the inside right a brace that keeps that right-hand wall vertical, but other than that there aren't any braces. I've done an approximation of the braces that I've seen on other modellers locos and wagons. After 15 hours, for a first print, the results, while unusable, aren't too bad (if you see what I mean). Except for the fact I forgot to put supports at the bottom of the porch (easily remedied), the front looks pretty good. The back - not so much. I've cleaned and sanded the build plate back to flat, and I'll check the settings and beef up that corner and separate the chimney pots and flaunch before printing again. I just misspelled flaunch, and found out that faunch (US) is to display angry excitement. You learn something new every day.

All I can say is I've been listening to "The Unbelievable Truth" on Youtube and I've found out I've lost 4m brain cells since I was 35. At least I think they said that, I can't quite remember.

Latest update, and all the brickwork has been done - thank goodness. I've not done chimneys before, so this was a first. I based their heights on the number of brick courses they took up. The concrete base (@chris p bacon did tell me what this was called, but it escapes me) is v regular, so I'll do what I did with the signal box and file it a bit after it's printed. Windows will look better when I put the arches, and sills in.

Ah, that's a bit of a sod. In that case, to answer a couple of questions, Any thoughts on the dimensional tolerances and feasibility etc. for 3D resin printing? For the Anycubic Mono X, (and my old Peapoly Moai), the tolerance is 0.2mm. However, this can be affected by the settings used to do the print. If the print is over exposed, then more resin will be deposited, if under exposed, less will be deposited. I'm afraid I can't help you with the printing (I live in Canada), but you could try @Knuckles of this parish who sometimes takes on commissions. Maybe instead of just doing one, do the one you want, and then do one "either side of that" with slightly smaller and larger dimensions. You've nothing to lose, so it's certainly worth a try.

Hi David, Although there are differences between brands/formulation, resin isn't generally known for its durability. I'm probably teaching you how to suck eggs here, but have you tried the forums on the Volvo Owner's Club website? https://www.volvoclub.org.uk/

While I'm doing the station building, here's a couple of GNR lamps I did a couple of years ago. The shorter one is in the photo in the post I wrote on May 8th. If you look, you can see I included in the design the glass that was placed around the burner. If you open the STL, you won't see the inner glass in an STL viewer, but if you print it in transparent resin it'll be there - at least it was when I printed it in Shapeways after creating it. Lamps.stl