Fen End Pit

Commercial 16mm scale figures tend to be a bit cartoonish and rather limited in terms of style and pose. My tiny new locomotive requires the driver to tuck his knees in to be able to fit in the tiny foot plate, in a mine he'd probably also be fairly hunched to avoid bang his head. I found myself following the same route as Mike Trice in the 3D Printed Passengers thread. Makehuman is an impressive bit of free software and is not too difficult to use. It is obviously intended mostly for the creation of 'game assets' for computer gamers and features a full range of figure and clothing options aimed at the 'sexy super hero' market. Still there are some clothing options of a more 'traditional' nature and you can create figures that won't look like extras from a Game of Thrones. There are times when some of the options, particularly those around the female form, feel 'NSFW' (Not suitable for Work) but we will pass over those... Without too much difficulty I created a fairly average looking man in fairly standard work-wear. Once created the figure is exported in a format which includes the 'rigging' which is the technical name given to the bone structure which can be moved around to pose the figure. Action now turns to Blender, another free application but this time a tool with so many options and possibilities that it is quite impenetrable at times. I had to watch a lot of Youtube tutorials to make any progress at all and still get horribly lost in the interface much of the time. However after quite a bit of swearing I was able to import an .STL file of the assembly for my narrow gauge locomotive. This would give me a reference to pose the figure around. The man was imported next and then scaled to be ~6' tall. The rigging can be seen in the screenshot as he is standing in the default pose from MakeHuman. Each of the rigs can be moved to give a suitable pose. It doesn't appear though as if the 'bones' are limited to human movement (knees can bend up for example) but after a bit of work I was able to position him seated, with legs pulled into the foot plate and his right hand on the throttle. The models have no solid form so it is perfectly possible to stick his foot through the floor. I found that the resolution of the model in blender was a bit lacking for 16mm scale so I also used the 'subdivide polygons' option in Blender to smooth the surface (basically it creates more triangles over the surface. Once happy with the pose the man was exported from Blender as another STL and loaded into Chitubox for slicing for the 3D printer. At this stage I decided he'd benefit from a hard hat so found one on the thingyverse and positioned it on his head. I printed him out and the result was pretty good. The only thing I wasn't happy with was the area at the top of his thighs were there was an unrealistic crease. I'm sure I could have fixed this in Blender but sometimes filler is so much less hassle! I'm not great at figure painting but I'm quite pleased for a first attempt. He still needs some better skin tone and facial features picking out. I will probably have a second go at the posing too, I thought I positioned his left hand to rest on his knee but I was obviously a bit off there. I'm also tempted to edit the model to add a hole though his body which would allow wires for a light on his helmet to pass down and then out through the post of the seat. It could be rather fun to give him and the locomotive separate lights, probably not much use on Fen End Pit but vital if we were to ever go underground. I hope this gives others encouragement to try modeling their own figures. David

Having worked on repairing my Lister thoughts have turned to building a new locomotive for Fen End Pit. I'd rather taken a fancy to the tiny battery electric locomotives built by the likes of Wingrove and Rogers and I thought that one of these engines might be worth trying to 3D print. A recent video in the 'Lawrie goes Loco' series on Youtube also rather drove my project along. There are some superb plans available on Flickr from J. Tilston. I purchased a number of his drawings on CD which used to be sold under the 'Industrial Narrow Gauge Illustrated' name back in the early 2000's. I tried to contact the email address a few weeks back to see if any more were ever produced but have got no reply. Does anyone know what happened to them? The drawings allowed my to produce a, hopefully reasonably accurate, 3D model of the loco broken down into parts which I thought I could print on my resin Phrozen Sonic Mini 4K. To give you some idea of the diminutive size of this little critter the 'footplate' was designed to fold up reducing the total length of the locomotive to four feet so it could be lowered down a mine shaft. The wheelbase is the same as a gauge, 32mm in my 16mm:1' scale. The wheels match the diameter of O gauge lowmac wheels. The first attempt to print all the bits took just under 3 hours and came out pretty well - the seat failed to print because I had not really got the supports right and some minor changes were made to the model to sort out the fit and clearances. I painted the battery box from this batch of printing as it came out well enough to use. I'll probably make some spares of this part and also the slightly different version with a 'peaked roof'. The main chassis is printed in a single part and includes recesses into which four 'High Level' etched hornblock guides can be installed. These were fitted after the assembly of the coupling rods and jigged using the 'rod with a taper on each end' jigs for 1/8" axles I use for Scalefour locomotive construction. I'm still undecided as to whether I'm going to need to work out a method of springing the axles or adding a compensation beam on the front axle or whether this will be unnecessary. The O Gauge lowmac wheels obviously don't have crank pins for coupling rods and are also rather skinny so I tried printing some overlays to go on the front of the wheels. These included a 1.75mm hole in the centre for the end of the axle and a hole into which an Alan Gibson crank pin bolt would self-tap. The actual front edge of the wheel overhangs the rail by quite a margin so I'm hoping I can stick the overlay in place, fill the gap between the overlay and the wheel itself and get away with it! The rods are just held in place by some wire insulation at the moment. I've 3D printed the coupling rods and bushed the holes in them with some brass tube. I suspect that in the end I might resort to getting these etched though. They are surprisingly strong in resin but I think metal would be a better choice for long term use. Ultimately the crank pin bolts will be cut short, proper crank pin nuts installed and then the crank pin covers stuck over them. These covers printed rather well given that they are only about 6mm in diameter, you can see the bolts and the grease nipple quite clearly. Again, for this test I just used a .05mm layer height, I will probably reprint at .03 for the final version. The wheels (or more accurately the overlays) were quartered by eye and the loco seems to roll along quite happily without binding. The plan for motorizing is to try an N20 type motor for the first time, I've got a pair of the '100 rpm' versions but I'm waiting on a slow boat from China for some bevel gears. The motor is intended to sit in a cradle built into the chassis and there is a cover which will (hopefully) hide the gears from Fen End Pit's sand and make the unit look more like the actual motor which was installed between the frames. (Picture below was version 1) of the frame print before some minor tweaks were added. Work on this project will probably pause now until the bevel gears arrive but I'm happy with the progress so far. I am still working on how to manage the power pick up as this locomotive will be powered from the rails as per the rest of Fen End Pit's locomotives. Fitting a DCC chip and stay-alive won't be an issue was the battery box is a very convenient space for them. I'm tempted to try and work out how to split the axles, I think I need to work out how to make some 1/8" internal diameter plastic 'muffs' to go around the axles. This would allow me to just connect some wires to the horn-guides and add some Brassmaster's shorting etches to the back of the wheels. For now, here are some pictures of the parts, loosely assembled into the shape of the completed locomotive. I will admit that I am really rather looking forward to seeing if I can actually make this run. I'm sure it will involve more work and printing - I can see the parts which don't make it being added the end of the Fen End Pit scrap siding, slowly disappearing under the undergrowth... David

That baseboard is roughly 2 x 4 feet. It is only 50mm deep, made of 6mm laser ply from slecuk. I find you don't need to have the braces in every quadrant, missing one out to work around point motors wouldn't be a problem. I found that without the diagonals the board would flex by about 10mm if you lifted up one corner, once the diagonals were added the flex is virtually nothing. David

I've done two things.. Either cut the diagonals a few mm over length and then sand the end to ~45 degrees, works but is a bit too time consuming for my lazy nature. alternative, the easier method is to buy some 45 degree timber trim about 10mm x 10mm. As most of the angles are around 45 degrees a short length of this can be used to butt up against the diagonal brace. David

Some time ago my Lister stopped working during an exhibition, it was returned to its stock box in disgrace and, in the absence of any exhibition outings to provide the impetus to repair it, there it had stayed. However a birthday present of a copy of 'Picking, Packing and Processing of Peat' by Paul Webb published by the Moseley Railway Trust spurred me into action. It contained too many nice photographs and drawings of Lister locomotives for me to ignore the overdue repair. Dismantling the locomotive showed up the problem quite quickly. The DCC chip is located under the roof and has four wires from the chassis passing up one of the corner supports. When two of the wires detached before I even pulled them it confirmed that the issue was a broken joint in the wiring. This time I attempted to do the job properly, fastening the wires to either side of a 4-pin Molex style socket. This means that the chassis can be removed from the body and the wiring disconnected. The wiring hides in the canvas weather protection but I need to do more to hide them at floor level. The locomotive is now back in working order, all we need now are some exhibitions.... maybe later this year. David

Some more progress on the larger of the two bridges at the Haverhill end of the layout, Ironically I'm building a model of the Stour valley but neither river is actually the River Stour. This is actually a mill race rather than the main river. I had to purchase another set of Woodland Scenics deep pour water to finish the job. Excellent service from Hattons, ordered on Sunday night, delivered Tuesday morning. Mind you, the price of the stuff probably implies that is it made from Dragon Tears fermented in golden vats over a fire made from Dollar bills... At the moment the surface is mirror smooth (apart from some ballast which has fallen on to it and I didn't brush off before the photographs. The intention will be to add some ripples from Mod Podge. I embedded some fine green string fibres into the river bed and I think the effect is pretty good. The other big job was sorting out the fascia. A piece of thin ply covers up the more functional ply underneath. It all makes the layout look quite presentable, particularly as I spent sometime tidying up the railway room. Over Christmas I did a 'stock check' of the library and current count of railway books is around 750. I wonder what 'too many railway books' looks like. The complete run of MRJ and Bylines takes up a fair bit of space too. More static grass now on order.... David

Hi Allan Sorry I've not seen that error so can't really help. I guess first thing would be to double-check all the cabling is correct. David

Anyone got a August 1997 Railway Modeller? might have a listing in the exhibitions section? Good luck in your search! David

I've been working on the second of the two river bridges on my model of Clare. For most of the building I've been using the laser cutter to make the brick work but the centre pier of the bridge has two different shapes at the ends. The upstream end is rounded and the downstream end is shaped to a point. The curve is impossible to cut flat and then bend and the multiple corners on the pointed end would have a some nasty joints to hide. I thought I'd give it a go on the 3D printer. I've also printed the girders. The polystyrene in the river bed will get covered in sculptamold prior to adding the Woodland scenics water. While playing with the printer I decided to have a go at a locomotive chimney. I think it is fair to say that the result looked better than the lump of white metal supplied in a recent kit. Lots of fun.. David

I had a play with Makehuman trying to make a figure to drive a narrow gauge simplex. I was able to mock up the seat and brake handle in Blender and then use the rigging of the figure exported from Makehuman to position the figure to sit and hold the brake. The limitation was the quality of the cloths which were very much designed for the cyberpunk games industry more than railway modellers, I could make a figure in jeans and T-Shirt or a business suit but not find any suitable overalls. I'll admit to finding some of the options in Makehuman 'NSFW' particularly when you start altering the size of female figures... David

I put a Microswiss all metal hot end on my Ender-5 Pro, very straight forward and definitely worth it. David

I designed a clamping mechanism for my double-ended cassette fiddleyard. It has proved to work very well in practice. Blog entry covering it is David

Sounds like you are taking a lot on there. The Rumney chassis are superb, just be aware that each one will take many, many hours to do justice to. The Gibson and Brassmaster's chassis are different beasts they will do a creditable job but for considerably less work. The results might not be as detailed but you will get a lot of wagons quicker. I believe the Brassmaster's units are designed to fit inside the plastic frames. The other option would be some of the Bill Bedford chassis kits sold by Eileen's. They are also relatively easy to build. I think in most cases you should be able to get existing frames off a built kit with a bit of scalpel work. Modifying existing underframes to fit W-iron types only is hard . The big problem being that the frames end up so thin where the W-iron sits. Good luck! David

As I mentioned in my previous blog posting, the splashers on the J17 kit were designed to accommodate the most steam-rollerish of flanges, being almost 4mm in diameter larger than scale. Well I've managed to take them back off the foot-plate. file them down to size and refit them. They look to be about .5mm too large now but I'm ok with a little extra clearance for the springing. Missing from the kit, but visible on the plans and photographs were the beading around the base of the splashers (which is also around the sandboxes when we get to them). This appears to be an L section and was added as two pieces of thin slim brass. It was fiddly but worth adding I think. It also had the advantage of helping to hide the gap where the new splasher is narrower than the original hole in the footplate. You'll notice that I've also solder the cosmetic piece of the mainframe which extends above the footplate between the splashers. This was obviously now too short to fill the gap. I've cut it as the gap will be hidden by the sandbox. Boy does my soldering look bad when magnified to this size! The belpair firebox will need some more drastic work though as there is now as enormous gap to fill. That fun is to come in the future. For now I'm just pleased to have moved forwards rather than backwards. the ride height is obviously wrong as there is no weight on the chassis at present. I did consider forgetting the brass splashers altogether and just 3D printing them and the sandboxes (I may still do the sandboxes as I did on the J20) but opted to stick with the brass for strength because of the limited thickness. David

So there I was feeling quite chuffed that I'd managed to get the wheels on the J17 chassis. There is a video which includes it running on youtube. Then I started work on the footplate, I got the buffer beam and valancing on quite nicely and then turned to the splashers. I felt quite good about the job I'd done until I put the footplate onto the chassis and realised that the kit had exactly the same issues as the previously built J20. Now I don't exactly know what size wheels and flanges the designer had in mind but I think they would have made even the most ardent Hornby Dublo 3-rail fanatic blush. The splashers are roughly 4mm larger in diameter than they should be. This, of course, means the hole in the footplate is much too wide as well. Printing out the GERS drawing and pasting the actual size of the splasher onto the kit really shows the problem. The front splasher/sandbox is equally bad, and probably even more of a pain to fix, I'm hoping that the smokebox sides still fit once the top of the sandbox is lowered to the right height. So I now have to remove the splashers, fill the gaps in the footplate, re-cut the splasher sides to the right size and re-bend the tops to the new profile. In summary - Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr David

A little package of wagon bodies was posted off last week and my friend Phil has put one together with its chassis and sent me a photograph. I think it rather looks the part. He just has another eight to do now, should keep him busy for a while.

I think either would be a decent machine and be a good first printer. I don't have experience of the Ender 3 v2 but have been happy with my Ender 5. I like how I have been able to make modifications to it to add automatic bed leveling with a BLtouch probe and change out the cooling fans to something a little quieter (not that the original were too bad). The amount of support and information online is excellent, folks like kersey fabrications and teaching tech on Youtube are particularly good. Have fun David

I'd recommend SLEC in Watton, Norfolk for laser ply. https://www.slecuk.com no connection, other than satisfied customer. David

For those who don't know what a J17 is, here is a picture. They were a James Holden designed locomotive built for the GER between 1900 and 1903, a sort of half-way house between the lighter J15 and heavier J20. As I hinted the J17 kit from PDK is also quite 'old school' by today's standards. The frames just had simple holes for the bearings, not even a half etched line as a nod that some people might spring or compensate their locomotives. Progress today has been quite swift, partly because I was working with such nice components and probably partly because I vaguely knew what I was doing with them! The High Level horn-blocks soldered in place easily, jigged into place by the coupling rods. I then added the spring carrier etches to the rear of the horn-blocks, using the 'space saver' design on the rear axle to give more clearance for the gearbox. Having fitted these I then widened the holes I'd drilled in the frames for the CSB (continuous springy beam) carriers. Following various recommendations these are made from Markits WD handrail knobs. Being parallel these can be fitted through from the outside of the frames and spaced from the frame so that the spring wire is the right distance from the frames to match the horn-block spring carriers. I fed a length of spring steel wire through them while soldering them to fit. The result was that the horn-blocks look to ride at an appropriate height and seem to be at the same level and 'sprung' the same amount - thanks due to the famous CLAG spreadsheet tool. One of the extra bits which had been etched was the springs, these solder to the bottom of the bearings and ride up and down with them. The result is that the wheels can easily be removed from the chassis simply by pulling out the sprung wire 'beam) Now I think I'll spend a few days procrastinating before I attempt to do anything with the wheels. David

Having put the J20 together and painted it I spotted that I'd missed a couple of important bits off. The first were the front guard irons which were easily soldered onto the front of the chassis. The others were, it appears, completely missing from the kit, these were the two large lockers in the cab, one of which has the reverser mounted on it. The kit appears to not have parts for these at all and they are not mentioned in the instructions. Photographs of cab interiors are notoriously hard to come by but the instructions for the 7mm scale Connoisseur kit had a good picture of how they expected their kit to be put together. Based on this, and the drawing from the Great Eastern Railway society collection I modeled up the two lockers in CAD and printed them out on the Photon. This was much easier than trying to fabricate them from brass. I thought the little reverser wheel came out pretty well. Once in place the cab looks much better. I need to pick out the dials and gauges and there is a crew on order from Eileen's. I've also made a start on the J17. So far the frames have altered to allow High Level hornblocks to be fitted, holes have been drilled for CSB mounts and the original slots for frame spaces have been filled. The frames have been assembled using some very ancient Perseverance frame spaces. I've also assembled the coupling rods from an etch produced by a friend which has lots of bits which will help with this loco and put together a High Level gearbox to make it go. Next step is to use the coupling rods as a jig to fit the hornblocks. Wish me luck. David

I have been making some more coal wagons for a friend's Irish project. The first attempt were slightly too narrow because some idiot (me) got the dimension wrong on the 3D model. Having fixed that we now have a models of 3 different types of wagon and the beginnings of a coal train. The wagon chassis department is apparently working at peak capacity assembling etched underframes. The 3 wagons are subtly different, one design has two doors in the middle while the other two have a pair of doors on each side. I can fit three wagons on the bed of my Anycubic Photon as the wagons are just less than the width of the bed. I have found that printing them at a 20 degree angle, and adding a tiny hole in the floor seems to give the best results. A close up of the end of the latest batch shows the diagonal layers, but they should be very easy to hide with a touch of paint. I think the tiny 'pressure relief hole' in the floor is helping to avoid layer issues cause by the suction effect of the wagon body on the print bed. You can (hopefully) see the differences in the body work when the three models are put together. Top is the four door variant with one type of door strapping (the top being a T shape on its side). Middle is the four door variant with the other form of door strapping (the top of the strapping being an L shape). Bottom is the two door variant. I'm looking forward to seeing what they look like with a chassis underneath. David

Hi The layout is 4mm scale, P4 track. Not sure what a 'dunny' is, the buildings are all scratch built, mainly from laser cut MDF, based on my own drawings. Good luck with your 2mm version. David

Over the last couple of days I managed to get a coat of primer followed by a coat a Stratford's finest black. This was a heavy freight locomotive and getting towards the end of its life so I've got a fair bit of weathering to apply. On most of the prototype photographs it is almost impossible to see the BR insignia on the tender! I've noticed I also need to paint the bolt ends on the brake-gear. I'm very pleased with the way the different components came together. The footplate had lots of additional bits required to fill in the space left by the original splashers and the sandboxes were home made 3D printed replacements. Also on the 'still to do' list is the glazing, it looks from the pictures I have that the front side window was glazed but the rear one was not. As I've said before the J20 was a bit of a beast and it makes an interesting comparison with the B12 behind it. Given that the B12 is a 4-6-0 and the J20 an 0-6-0 it is quite amazing that the boilers are almost the same size! Next into the works in a J17, this one is a PDK kit but I'm getting a head start because one of my friends built one recently so we know our way around it. David

I know it is a bit difficult to arrange but using a laser cutter is a great way to mark out cork.

I made a couple of changes to the wagon. I decreased the length of the bolts a touch (.6mm down to .45mm) and increased the size of the gap between the planks (.2mm to .25mm). I also added a 1mm hole into the floor and to my eye this has reduced the severity of the diagonal striping on the ends. I've just removed the support and haven't sanded the base at all. David