Etched Pixels

I'm particularly pleased with the backscene. The figure bluetacked on the left for scale is an N scale chap. A few spots to touch up and the cross pieces to get under the magnifier and glue in their proper place. I have no idea what I'll use it for or where it's going but it was fun to build

ATM do Axle Motion bogies

Obvious places would be to fix a container on the runner and put the motor in there. I think however you ought to just about be able to get the Kato tram chassis motor and drive shafts into the area between the bogies. I'm not sure how you'd drive the axles from it though, or more importantly how you'd get any weight on it. At least with a runner you'd be able to stick a whole load of weight in the rest of the fixed container. Rotating the crane looks easier as you can get miniature 1.5v pancake motors.

Will be very interested to know how it works and more about your laminator setup. I've got a pile of weird and wonderful decals I'd like to be able to make (for some reason KESR and WCPR decals are not widely available off the shelf!)

I've been using LNER loco numbers for some of my four wheelers - they have the right kind of look. It does mean you have to number your LNER locos with the digits 0456789 8) Alan

What are you using as a primer ? I've found some of the "proper" modelling primers pretty dismal and several of them have a very short shelf life too. Halfords make much better primers in my experience. Theirs has to not fall off cars after all. Alan

If you heat them up to about 60-70°C they'll soften and you can then do things like fitting wheels into bogies by gentle bending or fitting parts into one another. Alan

Well you are in part limited by the bounding box Shapeways allow but how it scales is more complicated - ideally it has other support but you can print girder type patterns on the inside of a wall of FUD rather than just thicken it. Also as your size goes up you can do lots of the core stuff in WSF instead.

Not if you are keeping the required wall thicknesses. It depends upon the model but its usually nearer a factor of 5-6 so merely £250+ in OO. Is £3000 for an O gauge one unreasonable given the price of O gauge wagons ;-) Alan

That has to be one of the cleverest bits of 3D print modelling I've come across. Looks excellent, I fear my wallet is going to get clobbered again and I don't even have a use for it 8) Alan

Bubble looks good - don't forget the exhaust pipes ;-) Talking of 1:1 railcars did anything happen about making the ppm in N gauge available in the end ?

That Tomix chassis integration is really neat.

The existing ones were screenprinted from the Cav'n'dish range. The inks and materials used are not practical today and the volumes required for screenprinting are large. I'm playing with some rather more modern techniques at the moment to build myself a 57ft Ocean Mails coach as a test then move onto other more generally interest stuff. Just need to find the willpower to draw up all that ... lining Alan

ATM had a pre-production one on show a few years ago but then it seems to have died the death. Might be worth asking Ben Ando about it ? Alan

Is the tower itself hollow. It looks slightly warped in the picture and I was wondering if it could have a length of steel or brass bar shoved up its bottom to strengthen it ?

Not had problems with the 3D print ones I did breaking and you can with care even print them in WSF. Dapol ones are also definitely a good choice. If you are using FUD for the bogies you'll need bearings - otherwise it wears away rapidly.

If you don't mind the beading edges being a tiny shade off the normal with the side (and imperceptably so IMHO) then the approximation is to make the side and the panels both solid blocks and then intersect them with the tumblehome profile at different positions. Rather easier than computing the normals and works fine for shall curves like sides, but not such a good idea for roof detail ! You need to make your sides a flat projection if you do this - if you start with a side designed to be curved and then extrude and intersect you of course end up with the positions somewhat wrong. The Dow book (vol.3 for the most part) has basic diagrams of the various coach types showing all the window layout and other handy details for each type. Historic Carriage Drawings has better detail but covers only a few vehicles - Barnums and the later stock, none of the six wheelers or shorter stock. In fact I've not found a good book on GC rolling stock at all. Alan

The Ultima one is the non articulated pair. Wouldn't be hard to do replacement ends, trussing and articulation bits if wanted but its a pretty obscure prototype and I'm not sure where drawings would lurk. Alan

You can certainly print multiple items together in one order and it seems to be cheaper that way. With your UFM160 do you have supports on the underside to keep the body from bowing while printing. Shapeways are now recommending that you have some kind of removable supports on the bottom of hollow FUD shells of length and I had to redo a couple of the railbusses for this. Alan

Welshpool is another one. Apparently it was ok for the post office to arbitarily rename 'foreign' towns while leaving the English one as 'Poole'. Wouldn't the map be a little different if they'd invented postcodes in the 1840s 8)

You can put a rounded top on a FUD wagon to hide the worst of the thickness (or indeed a tarpaulin ) The vertical lines are caused by the material that has to be printed below the bolt heads and the like to hold the material up as it is printed. For some types of model this isn't a big problem and in some cases you can avoid it by careful design of the parts (eg making some of the sticky out bits fittings that slot into a hole). I'll be interested to see how it comes out - I'm not as yet happy with the results for externally framed wooden wagons in FUD - even for the vans the support material under angled framing tends to mark the bodyside a bit. IMHO it's definitely the long term future for wagon bodies however, and lets you more easily reproduce all kinds of depth detail you can't do nicely in etched form. Alan