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Simple answer - substantial minefield!

 

2 major parts to the route through the minefield -

 

1) For N gauge bogies, you would be best served with a resin based printer rather than FDM - the Elegoo Mars gets decent reviews as the Anycubic photon seems to have alienated a lot of its fans by changing specifications recently. Alternative is to use a print house rather than owning a printer, probably one near you these days..

 

2) You will need to invest time and effort in learning how to use a CAD package to produce the 3D drawings of the bogies you want unless you have that skill in your locker already. There are a lot of free packages out there which will get you started and you tube tutorials on using them. Choosing one depends on your computer literacy skills, how powerful you laptop/PC is and familiarity with this kind of software. For a basic entry level, you could try Tinkercad which is free and cloud based so all the hard processing work is done by their servers, you don't need a particularly powerful computer to use it unlike some others which would run on your own machine.

 

Hope that gives you food for thought.

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Hiya, As Jim as said above a resin is deffo the way to go with N gauge size, look at filament based 3d printers the main thickness is 0.02mm - 0.03mm thickness with a 0.4mm nozzle. This can make things harder to produce small detail.

 

I am working with a company to upload a huge selection of 3d Printable Files in the Rail world. This will be available in early 2020.

 

 

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Thanks for the replies. I thought it would be complicated ... :o

 

Having done some more research, I'm not sure I have the capability, confidence or money to take this too far. 

 

I might try and find a friendly designer to see what could be done. 

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Somebody may already have designed the bogies you are looking for - either for 3D printing, or already in injection moulded plastic or even cast in white metal. There are a lot simpler things to design for 3D printing and the design process can be an interesting learning experience in itself. I use printing houses to produce my designs.

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 There are a lot simpler things to design for 3D printing and the design process can be an interesting learning experience in itself. I

 

That's absolutely, what it is, Mike!:good_mini:

 

Producing bogies is an advanced job and not the project for a beginner to start with. It's really easy beginning with a simple model like a crate, a platform or some tube loads. Even a house is mostly just a collection of a plenty of cubes.

 

The only real limit might be budget, but what do we pay for a brand new loco?

For N scalers as Jim said the Anycubic Photon might be the better choice: 320 GBP on Amazon

For 00 and 0 scalers I recommend to start with the Anycubic I3 Mega and PLA filament 250 GBP or the s-type 320 GBP

 

It was a big experience for me to realise: "What I can draw, now I can model!"

 

Merry Christmas to all!

 

Chris

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