TurboSnail

The LCDR coaches are also available here: http://www.roxeymouldings.co.uk/category/51/4mm-scale-lcdr-coaches/ I plan to have a go at one as a first step into etched brass kits at some point.

Bricks are now looking more bricky - coloured using a wash of mortar colour, then doing the brick faces with several reddish pencils, an idea I nicked from Phil Parker. Worked out better than I expected too, it gives a fairly uniform look with subtle variations in colour. Only issue is, I now have to spend a lot of time colouring in the main walls, although if the University bookshop is anything to go by, colouring in is a surprisingly popular student hobby!

It's very much home made, not the best engineering I've ever done... The components are a cheap motor and a pack of multiple sizes of gear, total cost about £3, plus some aluminium sheet and a lot of bodging to get it all to work properly. More info available on this blog post. The video doesn't really do it justice as anything filmed in 18fps will look terrible. I'm deliberately being vague about the specific components, as sellers seem to come and go on eBay - search '12v dual shaft motor' and 'module 0.5 gears' and you'll find similar things. The Mk2 shunter has a much better set of gears on order and the gearbox will form part of the chassis so will be far more precise - I'm working on that at the moment and it will be posted in this thread. I've been thinking of making a proper re-gearing kit for the Hornby 0-4-0 using a 3D printed gearbox and brass gears, but I've got a few other things to get on with before that

Glad you like it! The Mk2 will be on Shapeways, but only once I've built one to make sure it all fits together properly. It will be available in two parts, body and chassis, designed to work with specific gears, wheels and motor but will probably work with other ones with a few modifications. I can also put the more industrial-style Mk1 body on if anyone requests it, which should fit on a modified Hornby 0-4-0 chassis (but I don't have a spare chassis to confirm that with, as mine has a different motor and gearbox). I didn't intend this to be a 'product' when I started out, but I kept adding bits to the CAD to make my life easier later on, to the extent that it has pretty much ended up like a kit, so I may as well make the models available to everyone.

Painting is done! I think I'll have to admit that my ancient tin of Humbrol Super Enamel red has finally bit the dust, having formed a skin about 5mm thick on the surface... This lighting shows off the 3D printing lines nicely, it's not quite as bad in real life - being gloss doesn't help but it will get matt varnished at some point. Just need to do transfers now, and wait for the radiator mesh to eventually turn up.

Some further work on the Mk2 CAD, the chassis has a bit more detail added and there is some basic cab detail with a control panel. I also colour-coded the assembly to help keep track of things - the tan parts will form one print, the grey parts another, and the orange parts will not be printed but are used for reference.

So when two 'identical' tins of Humbrol come out as slightly different shades, they're actually being prototypically accurate rather than inconsistent? Full marks, Humbrol

I gave up on waiting for stuff to arrive and made a start on painting the mk1. The buffers have also been added and are Bachmann SR type. Two fairly heavy coats of Humbrol gloss black spray later... Some unevenness still shows from the 3D printing process and it looks a lot better/worse depending on the lighting. The body has not been sanded back at all, which I would do if I had more ambitions for this loco than just being a fun test. Spraying it in my freezing cold bedroom probably didn't help either (the only way to get any ventilation being to open the window fully). This project is reminding me that modelling can be fun when you have an idea of how much progress you're making. My layout has been a bit neglected recently as it got to the stage where I had a huge list of tasks and it didn't seem to be getting anywhere, so going away to uni with a few small projects is actually quite refreshing.

Finished exams for this term today, so I celebrated by spending an hour drawing a leaf spring for the mk2. Truly living the wild student lifestyle over here. Turns out it's surprisingly difficult if your CAD software is a bit dim and deletes all the part relationships every time you change a dimension. Still waiting for the radiator grille mesh for the mk1 to turn up before it gets painted. Probably should be expected from an eBay supplier though.

Whatever you want it to be really! I'm going for SR black, like the second image down on this page. According to the fictional backstory, it was developed in about 1937, so any livery from late SR to early BR could fly, although I doubt it would survive standardisation. Or who knows, maybe it was sold to an industrial concern? It will have mesh in, I have a few sizes on order to try out - I prefer 3D printing for large/simple parts, but all the detail will be seperately added such as handrails, horns, buffers etc.. Still not 100% sure about the size/shape of the hole yet though.

Some people seem to be able to make 6,000 cakebox challenge entries using nothing but their spares box and a few offcuts - not being blessed with a spares box the size of a small warehouse, I'm going the opposite route of buying stuff that I've never tried using before. Hence I am now trying to get to grips with plasticard, of the Slaters variety. Starting with 4mm brick for the various raised sections, I couldn't resist mocking it up to get a feel for how it will look. The plasticard still needs to be painted or coloured in, but that's for another day. Wouldn't want to make too much progress in one go!

I'm in that entertaining stage of waiting for stuff to arrive... Maybe I should make some progress on my somewhat neglected cakebox challenge entry. CAD model for the Mk2 is coming along nicely though. Body is pretty much there, but need to do some more work on the chassis and motorisation.

Now complete with lamp irons, cab steps, buffer mountings and roof. The cab steps are 1.5mm plastic strip and the lamp irons are 1mm strip and were the fiddliest b***ers to assemble that I ever hope to deal with... Should probably have used staples, but I'd run out. The roof is 0.5mm plastic sheet and has a gentle curve formed by taping it to a small jam jar overnight. I could have 3D printed this but a) I wanted to add cab detail, b) gentle curves are the worst for showing print lines, and c) it made the print a bit cheaper.

Any suggestions for this loco's livery? I originally wanted to do SR black like the original Maunsell shunters (see here). But I don't have the transfers to do it properly and don't want to buy a whole sheet for just this. Although I do have some yellow SECR numbers which could probably pass for the SR ones if I don't include the lettering. Alternatives are basically whatever colours I have lying around from other projects, including brunswick green and olive green. Or a more left-field approach might be to do an industrial style livery in grey or silver, maybe with wasp stripes if I'm feeling particularly talented that day, although it wouldn't really be 1930s/40s any more at that point. Any ideas?

All this time off Uni is increasing my modelling output massively - apparently I'm supposed to be doing something called 'revision'... Anyway, the shunter now has a cab interior, complete with massively oversized control desk covering the motor. If I'd planned the chassis to fit this body, I could have tweaked the motor position, but I think it looks alright like this and it won't be that visible with the roof on. Then I added handrails and door handles, all marked up by eye and surprising not all completely misaligned. Manual drilling was very slow, so the Dremel got to have another outing, resulting in my revision notes getting a fine sprinkling of dust. The handrails themselves are all made of stripped single core electrical wire (0.7mm, I think) as it was what I had lying around. Straightening it was a pain though. I used 0.5mm plastic sheet as spacers to make sure everything looks consistent.

The chassis will stay the same for now as I'm trying to keep this project as cheap as possible (I may have spent rather a lot on recent RTR purchases...). However, if it goes well, I'm planning a Mk2 version (CAD already in progress!) with a decent set of wheels and a printed/scratchbuilt chassis - I like the outside frames idea, and it would bring the design more in line with the original 350hp shunters too.

EDIT: This project is now finished and the kit is available from my Shapeways shop here. Features include: sprung buffers, NEM pockets, flywheel drive, pickups on all wheels, cab detail, etc. Due to the variability of the 3D printing process, I can't guarantee that everything will be a perfect fit, but the test model featured in the video went together easily. If you do decided to make one, please let me know (by private message or thread post) any feedback you have so I can make improvements to this kit and any future ones. Read on for an insight into the design and build process! An instructions and parts list sheet is attached, and the posts in this thread can help supplement this. Original post below: _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Does 3D printing count as scratch or kit building? I've put this thread here rather than in the 3D printing forum as it's not about the process, rather about using a basic shell as a starting point to build up a model, which in my opinion is more like resin kit building. If it's in the wrong place, I'm sure someone will let me know... Anyway, I had a modified Hornby 0-4-0 chassis from an experiment into reducing the gearing to make it a good slow runner. This was mostly successful, so I felt like I had to make a body for it, which will be equally as experimental. One of my sources of inspiration was the Maunsell 0-6-0 diesel shunters (more info here) with the sloped windows in the lower cab, so here's the story: during development of the 350hp shunters (designed to compete with the Z class steam shunters), Maunsell also designed a smaller 0-4-0 version to compare against the Terriers and the like. Being short of time, some of the work was outsourced, hence incorporating some industrial shunter design into the mix (I should probably work on this justification a bit more, but I wanted to get on with the model! It's supposed to be fun, not super accurate). I drew up a basic shell on CAD, then got it printed by Shapeways (only £12!) in the 'Strong, White and Flexible - Polished' material as the shell was only ever going to be a base to detail up, so there's not much detail in it. First job, make it fit the chassis. The dimensions are approximately the same size as a Terrier, only slightly shorter, so the chassis needs cutting down. Once done, the body is a tad wonky... Adding some microstrip spacers cured this.The footplate needed a little massaging on the inside to allow the wheels to rotate freely - this took surprisingly long, and the help of a dremel, so they weren't kidding when they called the material strong! So now I have a decent starting point and I need to add: cab interior (to cover the motor), roof, handrails, access door handles, lamp irons, buffer mountings, buffers, coupling hooks, steps and anything else I can think of to improve the detail. TS01 Instructions & Parts List.pdf

Found a pic on the Abandoned Miniatures facebook page of a diorama by a chap called Gustavo Andrade. A good source of inspiration, although mine will depict a much larger engine, with a lot less rust!

Thanks! To bring things slightly back towards on topic, it made a nice easy repaint job to improve my skills without getting too frustrated at trying something way beyond my ability. If you're interested, the build post is here: http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/110012-secr-terrier-751-build/

I dug out the 'White, strong and flexible - polished' model and here are the worst bits. As usual the curse of the camera makes it look worse than it is (the model is OO scale). The sides are better and just have a rough finish rather than print lines - could probably fix with some high build primer.

The 'white strong and flexible - polished' material might be worth a try, I've got a couple of models in it and the layers don't really show very much - unfortunately I don't have an normal WSF version to compare it to though.

The mirror acrylic tile turned up, so I've made a start on the structural card parts. The whole thing is designed to fit into a space of 200x200x150mm, so should meet the 8x8x6" size rule which is about 203x203x152mm (I'm too young to remember what inches were...). All the dimensions are taken from my CAD model, so I can just copy measurements without having to work anything out.

That looks pretty good actually. I've previously done a van in no. 32, which I think is a bit dark, but it's fine for that as it will be heavily weathered in it's role as a grounded body. Trying to gauge an accurate colour is not easy as the preserved examples vary wildly in colour, from the Bluebell's dancehall being quite light, to their freight wagons being much darker. Assuming that Pheonix's research is better than mine, no. 67 is probably worth a try.

Time to play with test the layout! I took a short video and had a go with some free editing software, not the easiest thing to get the hang of... Filmed on my rather tired Windows Phone camera, maybe Father Christmas will get me a better one? The Terrier is working well, as are the points and controller. The remote uncouplers still need some fettling, although I think that's mainly down to my test wagons all being old Wrenn/Hornby/Triang items with all the tension locks at different heights and different states of rusty!

I got back from Uni to find a package from Shapeways has arrived. This means I might have to do some work on the world's slowest progressing Cakebox Challenge entry... So I have a flywheel, starter motor (basically a small steam engine used to start the massive steam engine) and a couple of bearing blocks for the flywheel. All were printed in their 'White, strong and flexible - polished' material; the polishing should mean that the individual layers are less obvious, and it seems to have worked pretty well, although it will be easier to tell once I get some paint on them... eventually. Going for the 'Frosted ultra detail' material would have massively increased the cost and not completely got rid of the issue, so I'm glad this material choice paid off. The flywheel and starter motor even mesh pretty well. The starter may be pretty crude, but I can add some more detail like pipework and valves later on, as these aren't particularly suited to 3D printing.