flubrush

Ian, The finish at 0.05mm layer height is excellent - you only start to notice it on the sides when I go in very close with the camera and use quite oblique lighting. Apart from one or two test prints, this is the only model I've printed so far, so my experience of the printer is quite limited. I will be digging out some of my files of wagon detail parts and maybe try 0.03mm layer height to see how good the results are since I have a few prints done of them on my older Shuffle. Jim.

Scott, Just the hopper - Mr. Greene will be doing the underframe, and Mr. Provan has done a nice wee etch of the brake gear. :-) Jim.

I got a new 3D printer a couple of weeks ago and I've used a job I was doing a year ago as a first project on the new machine. The printer is a Phrozen Sonic Mini 4X which is one of the newer breed with a mono LCD screen giving smaller exposure times, and a smaller pixel size giving better definition. The model is a body for a NER 7T hopper wagon, destined for a layout somewhere in the Leeds area. The last picture shows the pile of rejects on the way to the final result shown in the top three pictures. It took a while to find out what the new printer and a new (to me) resin would could achieve, and there was a lot of fiddling around with the slicing software to get a good layout of supports. I gave the body a scoosh of Halford's grey primer to make picture taking easier and I should have cleaned it a bit better. :-) I've also not taken off all the support pips. An 0.05mm layer thickness was used and it is just visible with the oblique lighting in the pictures but is pretty well invisible at normal viewing. One big advantage with the new printer is that I was able to print the body and its supports in one piece. With my previous work on the body a year ago, I had started to split the supports from the main body to make the printing easier. There's no rivet detail on the inside of the body since it was thought that the wagons would normally be fully loaded. But might have a look at adding some along the top inside edge since that will probably still be obvious when loaded. Jim.

More than likely on the right hand side of the firebox as in the picture of the Stroudley single above. That is where the Westinghouse pumps were situated on tender locomotives on the Caledonian where Drummond moved to after his period at the North British. Drummond seemed to be strongly influenced by Stroudley and a lot of Stroudley features appeared on his locomotives designed for the NB and the Caledonian. In fact some of these features were still apparent on Caledonian designs by his successors on the Caledonian. Jim.

Over the past year or so, I've been going down the road of using the 3D prints themselves on models, especially when you are not going to use too many. On even the smallest 3D printer, you can pack a good few parts onto the building plate which offsets the longish time required to do a print. If your intention is to use the 3D print as a master then its quality will be as good as, if not better than, any casting made from it. In the future we might look at the Parts Department holding a library of STL files which are used to print parts when required. This would suit a society such as ours, with a small membership and a very wide range of interests. Who does the printing would obviously have to be worked out, but the cost of 3D resin printers is dropping all the time so ownership is much easier now than it was a year or two ago. Jim.

Rich, I think you might have to start drawing something up. :-) The only bogies I can remember in S were GE bogie sides of which a good few were around some years ago, but no longer around today. Maurice Hopper produced a resin cast Fox bogie side and I think they are now finished, but the masters are still around to do another run if required. Alan Gibson also provided some whitemetal LMS bogie kits. But I can't remember of anything else. I have done a 3D print of a Caledonian Fox bogie and that worked quite well, so you might consider going down that road if you can get access to a printer. Jim.

From the same software house as Giles' VCarve is Cut2D Desktop which has all the 2.5D features and costs a good bit less. It has 2D drawing facilities but nowhere near as good as a full 2D CAD program. I use NanoCAD which is an AutoCAD clone and has a free version. I use Mach3 to control my mill. It's getting a bit long in the tooth now, but having been around for years means that there is a huge amount of support for it. Jim.

If I remember correctly it was Sam who did the main work on the baseboards for Thame. Jim.

The build plate on my Phrozen Shuffle was quite heavily scratched from new such that you can see the scratch pattern on anything printed on the plate. Jim.

If you are going to have a lot of 48" radius (or thereabouts) curvature you might do what I did some years ago when building a layout which was oval shaped and on which pretty well ever bit of track was going to be around 48" radius. I made up a set of gauges to maximum gauge widening - 0.896" - and built everything, including pointwork, to this gauge. Even on the occasional bit of track which was getting close to straight, the same gauges were used. It might mean that you have a bit more sideplay on wheels on some bits of track but nowhere near enough to allow the wheels to drop into the four foot. Jim.

The minimum radius recommended is normally around 48 inches and you might want to add in a bit of gauge widening as well. That would normally allow for smaller locomotives - 0-6-0 tender, 0-6-0 tank, etc. You can go tighter than that but you are then limiting yourself to short wheelbase locomotives - like 0-4-0 tanks - and gauge widening would be necessary. Jas Millham does get larger locomotives round less than 48 inch curves but he does clever things with their chassis to achieve that. For Jubilees and large Pacifics, I suspect that you are going to have to look at larger than 48 inch radius curves - maybe 60 inch and larger. Their longer driving wheelbase and accommodating clearance for bogies, etc., would probably require that. Another thing that can help with tight radii is using wheels with deeper flanges and some 4mm scale wheel profiles would suit, also some of the Gibson S scale products as well. Jim.

Whatever prototype you decide to model, the next decision should be how you are going to pickup from the rails since that dictates how you will build the chassis of the locomotive. If you are going to use all metal driving wheels then some form of split axle pickup is probably the best way, either by using split frames or insulated axleboxes. This can have knock-ons on how you attach your superstructure to the frames to avoid shorts across the frames. You can use plastic centred wheels for split axles pickup but you have to carry out a fiddly operation by putting shorting links from tyre to axle and hiding them behind the spokes. With plastic centred drivers, you can use the wire scraper pickups on the tyres, or the more sophisticated plunger pickups and the frames need no insulation between them or the superstructure. An 0-6-0 inside cylindered locomotive is probably the best bet to start since you don't have the additional complication of outside valve motion. About every pre-Group or Grouping company had one or more prototypes so that should give you a wide range to choose from to get something you want. A tank loco might also be better since the tanks provide a lot more space in the body to hide motors, gearboxes, DCC decoders, etc., and you don't have to build a tender. :-) In S scale we tend to provide either compensation or springing since we are working with scale depth flanges. Jim.

I'll just tag this on here. I am reminded of Stan Garlick's method of compensation onj an 0-4-2 tank, which was the same as Simon has oulined above. But in Stan's case he made the frames as a sandwich of thin plate spaced apart and the equalising beams on the driving wheel axles were hidden in the sandwich. It was a bit of extra work, but probably worth it if your locomotive had a lot of space under the boiler and equalising beams on the inside of the frames would be quite noticeable. If I remember correctly, the locomotive and its compensation featured in an article in the MRN or MRC in the early 1960s. Jim.

Not at the moment - my CNC mill is out of service. It was old enough to rely on using the old 25pin parallel port on a PC for its connection and the old PC driving it gave up the ghost a week ago. So rather than try and find another old PC with a parallel port, I am biting the bullet and upgrading the machine to work from the USB port of an up-to-date PC. Wish me luck. :-) Jim.

On the 0-4-4 chassis, at this late time, can I throw in a suggestion that I think Stan Garlick used many years ago, which is to treat the loco as a twin bogie chassis with the two driving axles as one bogie and the carrying bogie as the other. This means that both bogies can be pivotted at their centres and the problem of the 0-4-4 overhang is solved. I tried this out some years ago and it worked quite well with the driving wheel bogie pivotted with a press stud. The driving wheel bogie was powered with an RG4 with the motor poking into the firebox space of the boiler. The only problem I found was that the bogie could do wheelies if power was applied quite strongly and it did need some fore and aft control to avoid this. I suspect that Stan had dealt with this in his chassis. I'm afraid the loco never got finished as we moved house and all modelling stopped for quite a while. On turning tyres, I use a knife tool to cut the tyre to diameter with the topslide set over to three degrees and I leave the flange as a rectangular projection which is wide enough to accommodaate the root radius of the flange. Then the form tool is used to shape the rectangular projection into the flange profile and root radius and I avoid letting the form tool start cutting the tyre, which could put too much stress on the way the wheel is being held. Jim.

William, When I checked the Alan Gibson Workshop wheels with our form tool, the flange width was OK and the flange depth was 0.024". or 0.006" too large. So taking 0.006" off these wheels' flanges would pretty well get them to SSMRS standards. If you do the adjustment with a form tool, that would probably guarantee the standard. You would have to be careful using the form tool so that you don't loosen the tyre on the plastic centre. And don't let the form tool start cutting the tyre face since the forces will almost definitely mess up the wheel. A few members actually prefer the AGW wheels since the deeper flange helps to keep things on the rails if you have tight curves on your layout. Jim.

The plain disk coach wheels in Parts have original Alan Gibson tyres, so to the SSMRS standard and won't hit the chairs. If you need that size you can punch the centres out. I have also done some specials for other members using the complete wheels and CNC cutting the disks to produce 3' 7" spoked wheels. Paul Greene might want to know about the axles. I believe that they are difficult to manufacture and producers tend to quote minimum order quantities which could keep the SSMRS satisfied for the rest of this century. :-) I specified parallel journals for the axles on my wagon wheels and got minimum order quantities in the hundreds. It was also a look ahead to sprung W irons where parallel journals are preferred. Parallel journals have a bit more rolling resistance than well adjusted pin point bearings but I doubt if any UK S scale layouts could run train lengths where the difference in roll resistance might be a problem. :-) Jim.

Your wheels look very good on the loco. Jim.

I'm sorry I can't. My printer is a Shuffle and all the key settings for exposure, etc., are in the printer's software. All Chitubox does is slice the model. But I remember when doing S scale wagon wheel centres that I progressively reduced the number of start layers to see when they stopped sticking to the plate and found that I could get down to one start layer. I was almost tempted to try no extended start layers. :-) With other larger parts which were spacers for the chassis of a 1:32 scale loco, I put chamfers on the bottom corners to offset the growth of elephant's foot and that might take a bit of experiment until you get a good result. Jim

I think - yes. You insinuated that the SSMRS was insular with regard to Europe when it patently is not. I've researched the German and French model railway systems mentioned. The BUB system was not S gauge, but 24mm gauge. The models were produced from 1945 for ten years. The quality of the system was comparable to the cheaper Hornby clockwork system. The Stadfilm system was produced for an even shorter time in the early 60s and a steam loco and a two coach railbus was all that was produced. Arguably the quality was a bit better than BUB, but still very much childrens toy quality. The French JEP Ecartement S lasted for a very much longer time, but at best you could only term it a children's toy from pictures of stock seen on the Internet. The history on the S scale web site is about the development of the scale to cater for railway modellers, with a good, scale representation of prototypes. Jim.

Just watch out when you print directly on the plate that you might get elephant's foot on your prints caused by the extended layer exposure times for the first few layers. I've got round this by either putting rebates on the first few layers. I also tried reducting the number of inital burning on layers and actually got away with one layer on some small objects and everything stayed on the plate. Worth experimenting but make sure you don't leane anything in the resin - you need to filter it regularly if you suspect that bits havedropped off. Jim.

That's a cheap shot and not true. The S Scale Society in the UK is probably one of the smallest with about a hundred members. The majority of members model British and Irish prototypes but I know of several who model other railway prototypes from Europe and around the world. One of our members posted a message about his DB layout just over a week ago in RMWEB. And back in the 50s and 60s, where would a modeller in the UK find out about railways and model railway systems in other parts of the world. The British model railway magazines concentrated on the UK and there would have been no mention of European models other than the best known makes being imported by a few retailers. In the days of the Berlin wall, products from East Germany would have been very difficult to obtain. And at the same time we had several very good importers of US models - like Bernie Victor and Bill Eaglesham. So access to US models and literature was relatively easy. That's how I started an interest in US modelling and I could get S scale RTR as well. Jim.

The gauge is now accurate to scale on both sides of the Atlantic although we disagree by one thou. 0.884" in the UK and 0.883" in the US. The UK S scale society drew up the accurate standards in the 1960s and members were using the standards from the 1970s. The US moved from the original 7/8" gauge to 0.883" some years later. Jim.

The wheel profile used on all the Society wheels (not the Gibson wheels) are based on a prototype drawing that Trevor Nunn sourced. New Tech Tools made the form tools to match this drawing and one of these form tools has been used to generate the driving wheel tyres, and my wagon wheel tyres. Slaters made their own form tool from the same drawing for their wagon wheels. I'll see if I still have the drawing around, or it might have gone up to Paul Greene in amongst all the Parts paperwork. I actual;ly did that drawing on the website many years ago and it is a bit basic. :-) You can also see it on the ScaleOne32 site as well - ask Mr. Dunkley about that. :-) Jim.

That looks like a good solution. I built one loco with Sharman wheels some years ago and used Gibson plunger pickups and they worked fairly well but getting the wiring right was the problem, as you note. I think I used pickup arm wire which was the most flexible I could find. I was wondering if you were considering inlaying a shorting wire and metal plate in the wheel boss to provide for split axle insulation. Jim.