edubs

It was very helpful to me recently to know that Mitchell was an employee of Shapeways, and a railway modeller, through reading some of his previous posts in this group, and he very kindly helped me out with some advice recently after I contacted him directly. Shapeways customer service seems pretty good, but I needed to speak to someone who knows what a solebar is. Nice stuff by the way fella.

A couple of pics. Edit. I should say, this is the first one, which had the strips of unwanted material running down the sides, so it's been hacked about a bit.

Hello Alan,apologies for the delayed reply, I've been away.Thanks for the comments, I agree with every point.I'll be ordering some prints of the GN and SEC vans shortly, in the meantime I've got my "test pieces" to play with, I'll try and post a picture, and I need to fix my Brighton van design of the inaccuracies mentioned in my first post.Cheers, Eddie.

Hello Dave, and thanks, I might do some variations on the Brighton van. I think Etched Pixels does a brass kit for the Stroudley roof profile van, but I think this is 1/148 scale? Opens are a bit tricky, it seems that to be sure of printing in FUD sides would need to be pretty much 1mm thick. single plank wagons ought to be do-able though, my solebars came out fine at .5mm thick. I might do an LBSC road vehicle truck at some point.

Some images from Blender. Sorry about the crazy perspective, I'm working in Meters instead of millimetres.

New link in later post Hello. This link should hopefully take you to a few bits that I've been working on. I have had a couple of the Brighton vans made, and I'm very happy with the results, although the first one had some extra material printed on the sides, running down vertically from some bolt head detail, I think Rich Brummitt describes something like this in his recent article on 3d printing for the 2mm scale assoc. mag. Shapeways refunded me for this part. I was able to change the file without compromising the model. I did have a slight problem with some bolt heads on the solebar not being large enough objects to be seen by Shapeways' system, but Mitchell from Shapeways was able to put me back on track here. The second model arrived pretty much perfect, the vertically planked doors alone having visible horizontal print lines that will need to be scraped off. Apart from that, I'd say that 80% of the model finish is to the standard of a plastic kit. Unfortunately I haven't been able to take any decent photos of the models in their as delivered state! Also unfortunately I've noticed that I managed to mess the planking up somehow, the top plank is too narrow, and the upper door hinges are too high up, so I'm going to have to sort that out before I go any further. My next move after I've done that will be to put all 4 vans into 1 file and see how they all come out. This will have to wait for a week or two as I've got other stuff going on. I'd much appreciate any feedback, comments, criticisms or questions regarding this, thanks for looking. Eddie.

I too had to ditch a project because of this seemingly ridiculous policy. I can only find 46 scale models on the I-materialise site, compared to the many hundreds on shapeways. Those 46 include certain NSR brakevans, and a couple of other obviously sprued models, so the real total of models actually for sale must be even lower.

Repainted Bachmann, except for the AVB one at the far end in the first pic which is parkside body on scratchy U/F. Ruston's 7mm minerals are doing it for me... I just spotted the missing door spring on the middle pic.

On a glorious 12th of June 1964, D3669 departs Merton Lane sidings with a short freight bound for Wimbledon west yard. The mineral wagons will be dropped off at Devonshire road coal yard on the return journey, the run round loop there being out of use by this date. Bath Bros. doll factory can be seen in the distance, but the suburban housing that surrounds the site is now hidden by the verdant tree growth that makes the scene very green for a London location.

I'm doing one of these Ratio GW 5 planks at the moment, havent done one for a few years. all I needed to do was make 10 thou styrene "washers" to space the bearings away from the back of the axleguards and the wheelsets fitted just fine. You need to assemble the sides and ends and pop the wheels in fairly smartish so that you can adjust everything square while there is still a bit of give in the corner joints.