RSS Fetcher Posted March 25, 2014 Share Posted March 25, 2014 After an offer to Rabs of a file to try on his (then new) printer rather a lot of time passed and after an almost near miss with the postal service a little package arrived through the door recently with a bright orange one of these in it. The detail is comparable to some of the finest stereolithography that I have witnessed from professional bureaus. I know Rabs has spent quite a lot of time tweaking and practicing, refining the machine and the process and it has been worthwhile. The next picture shows a close up. The stepping is visible but was quickly cleaned up with some small fine sanding sticks over the course of an evening, trying to avoid destroying the rivet detail. They were all there in the CAD file The upper end was the worst but being the end it will usually be less visible than the sides and I think it will be okay but not perfect once painted now I've smoothed it out. Under 9x magnification the rivets seem to have distorted here but they are barely visible to the naked eye at 2'. The resin is supposed to have similar properties to some injection moulded plastics. (I didn't ask which ones, because it isn't important to me, sorry.) It is a little brittle and I have lost one of the buffer housings already, along with a small amount of the headstock. This, I suspect, is due to the very thin wall thicknesses. I don't know what I was thinking when I modelled them because I can't use the buffer housings that remain: this type are too small to drill such that they will accept a shank and head when the shank is 0.5mm. It will be back to brass for the buffers in due course, and I have some small repairs to make. I had considered using this as a master for resin casting a few more of these but there were never many of them built and their size meant they were not very useful except for bulk volumes of traffic, which were often conveyed between major traffic centres under darkness. They would be great for anyone craving a 47xx that gets one. Except for that they are a bit of a GWR modelling cliché. At least my model of a branch line isn't a terminus So for the moment I'm continuing on as a one-off. I have built the bogies up to check the buffer height and having used nearly all the packing pieces on the bogie etch it's looking pretty good so far. The GPV at the right hand side shows quite clearly why you can't produce one of these from two iron mink kits. To be continued... View the full article Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.