JCL

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

Hi @DGO, sorry I haven't replied, for some reason I didn't get a notification. You're right about the Ladies being in a separate place. I'll do an outside gents, and then some sheds, and next time I'm in the area, I'll knock in the door and ask if I can snoop around. In the meantime, work is moving on somewhat and most of the brickwork and window placement is done. Looking at it on the printer, it's pretty big, and the main building takes up most of the plate. On this one, the roof is really plain, so I'm definitely doing that separately.

I think you've done wonders. On the banding, it doesn't matter what consumer tech we use, it will be there. Even with the resin printers, there are lots of conversations about banding going on in the Mono X thread in the 3D printing area. The 3' rule always applies

You're getting some great quality out of your printer Mike - it looks fantastic.

Hi @TomE, changing the subject slightly, how thick are the skirts you put on underneath the vans? I've got the week off, so was going to attempt to print a couple of wagons myself. Also, were there any concerns about suction? cheers Jason

@Quarryscapes It could easily be. I sometimes get website functionality glitches and clearing the cache normally sorts it out. If that doesn’t work then reinstalling the browser is the last resort. First thing to try would be a different browser.

That's true, but Windows home has a different updating regime to Windows pro (delaying and such), I assumed (probably wrongly) that office update would mirror the Windows one. Interestingly, I've been told that some people have been advised to reboot up to 3 times and that might fix it. It sounds a bit old wive's tales territory, but maybe that's what happened to me, and not an Office update.

My MS Outlook is working properly again today. I'm on Windows home, so I am assuming there was an overnight update.

If you use the app version of MS Outlook instead of the online/browser version, don't update to the latest version as there is a bug that hides the email content.

Good to see you sorted it out Mike. For anyone interested, MS Windows 10 has a program called 3D Builder. I always open my exported STL in there to see if it needs repairing. If anyone uses it, the standard output is 3mf, so you'll need to use Save As to save as an STL file. Save As can be found in the hamburger menu (the three lines) to the left of Insert.

Hi @DGO, you have had me going back through my photos (thank you!) to have another look at that door. One I got from a very nice man in Spain (deva-bob, he's on Ebay and is a thoroughly nice man) shows that there was a sign over the door at the end of the 1950s. This one shows the door in the 1970s or early 1980s, but unfortunately the sign's gone (dagnabbit). I remember those fire buckets from when I was a kid.

I'm another one for Anycubic grey to go with my Mono X, I also have clear as that's what came with my machine. This is partly because I've not got around to trying anything else yet. The big thing is to make sure you cure your model before painting it. I use ordinary primer from my local hardware store and paint on that. I've not used eco so far, because it says it's biodegradable, and I can't find out what it's lifespan is and what factors might affect it.

Next up is the station building. I've a lot of photos of the front, platform side and road side, but there's going to be some detective work necessary regarding the sheds around the back. Here's a couple of photos I took 4 years or so ago. Here's where I am after messing around for an hour today. Window sizes of the station house will be finalized later as I'm going to base them on the brick size. The green section containing the gents will be printed separately. This is the area I'm going to have to squint at to make sense of it properly. In the photo above, you can see a chimney next to the waiting room. I thought it was for a fire in the waiting room, but looking at some other photos of it, it's actually detached. This means, that it's for whatever is to the right of the boarded up door.

Now that is genius!

In the end, for the photo, I've stolen a lighting insert that's supposed to look like fireflies in a jar and used that to light up the interior. I've also found some Krystal Klear for the windows. I think I might need a bit more black on the ceiling. But glazing and signboards, then it's onto the next one.

I'm really pleased with it. I added some heavy duty supports to the underside. I think that, the fact it's ribbed inside, and that it's quite thin (1mm) compared to the walls, means it came out ok. I'm going to print the roof for the waiting room next and see how that compares. I did knock off both finials, but a quick sand and some superglue has sorted that.

Almost finished. In the photo below are the first and last prints. I was able to use the first one to determine the exact shape of the floor. I modelled the chimney pot on a plastic box the same size as the chimney top, and then just filed it down to a better shape. Then I built it up - pretty much the same way that's described in this month's BRM. In my case using picture mount card (as I have a lot to hand) Everything fits - just. In the end, the only version of the lever frame that worked in this scale, and with my printer, was the 1.75 times thicker one. A quick chat on the GNR Society forum about colours, and I've painted it as it would probably been around 1900. I now need to glaze it - I need to work out how to glue it in. I've looked for Glue 'n' Glaze, but it's $30, so I'll have a look at something else. As soon as I can light it, and before I glaze it, I'll take a final photo.