Bufferstop's Bench Confessions of an Unrepentant Basher

[Mountain]

I sent a pm again this morning but this time I used a reply to an old message. Hopefully it will work! Was just about a little coach I saw going cheap and thought it would be ideal for your railway.

[Bufferstop]

It would but my railway now resembles a heritage site out of season. Just about every siding and loop full. The mythical coach sidings "up towards the junction" are getting called in to action more and more of the time. Just spent twenty minutes or so shunting around stock to make space for the newly arrived railcar. and clear the tracks to give "Guy" a safe passage when he arrives.

[Dad-1]

He, He, running out of space John ?. What a unique problem for a railway modeller !!
Recently had a tidy up and THINK it's 427 wagons, but then it may be a few more ?

Geoff T.

[Dave]

Recently had a tidy up and THINK it's 427 wagons, but then it may be a few more ?

Not much point in trying to palm of all my spare junk on you Geoff

[nickbrad]

I love your version of a W&U bogie coach, I keep wanting to make one of my own as I cannot afford the brass kits, (assuming there are any left) but my sticking point atm is working out how to recreate the vents etc above the side windows. I don't think I'd be happy with any thing I could come up with if they aren't there.

[Bufferstop]

I chickened out on the ventilators, but I want to do a proper panelled old time coach at some stage. It's a toss-up between a multi layer side, laminated from sheets cut out on the Silhouette cutter or producing a sufficiently detailed drawing to 3D print the coach side. I could really do with taking a look at a coach of a similar style and see what they looked like, good excuse to visit another heritage line.

[nickbrad]

If you can get yourself to the North Norfolk railway, one of these coaches still exists there, so you don't have to settle for a similar style

[Bufferstop]

Bit of a way for a quick nip out, when you are bang in the middle of the country. Thanks for the location though. I'll do a bit of research. I've just managed to draw and print a panel of chamfer edged 6"x2" planks. Might mange 3"x1" if I print them on a thin raft to stop them breaking apart.

[flying scotsman123]

I came up with a horrible way of doing those sorts of ventilators a while ago. I filed the negative (just some grooves basically) into a piece of metal (happened to be a strip of metal that was a wagon weight) then smeared a piece of 10 thou plasticard onto it using a soldering iron! It worked pretty well, but I fear just having the windows open wasn't really effective enough to keep the atmosphere entirely free from certain chemicals released...

[Bufferstop]

Melting plastic is one that I try to avoid,I'm not to enamoured of epoxy resin either for just those reasons. I've tried casting with undiluted PVA, it can take days to totally solidify and it needs a coat of varnish as soon as it has to prevent it from dissolving again. Definition is pretty poor but did a couple of manhole covers ok.

[nickbrad]

I wish I had access to a scanner, I have every book published on the W&U line here, I could send you plans if only I could transfer them from my book to my pc.

[TimberSurf]

Nickbrad, the modern digital camera has a resolution that now surpasses what a scanner can do! Just lay the book under a light and take pictures!

[nickbrad]

Alas, I only have a Samsung S3 mini at my disposal, (hence the poor pics on my own threads,) but I may have to try anyway, see what I end up with.

[TimberSurf]

Samsung S3 mini, 5 megapixels is more than adequate to produce high quality pics of A4 (definitely if only text)

[Bufferstop]

I've been practising with the various bits of free CAD software that I can use to feed my 3D printer. The full fat versions are just too far beyond justifying the cost. The one that seems to work the way I think is Design Spark Mechanical from RS. Of course being a freebie something has to be missing or hobbled, in this case it's the ability to flip or mirror an object, which is a bit of a bind. If the object you are modelling is symmetrical in the Y and Z planes you can work around it by copying, rotating, and merging otherwise you just have to draw the bits each way around. So I decided to go for something that might be useful, a skeletal bogie frame. Here it is on screen.

On the left is the 3D model, in the centre the slicing and printing software for the printer, which is itself just visible next to the tea mug. You'd be hard pushed to see in that photo that the finished object is sat in front of the screen, so here it is.

It was quite a test of the printer, it was printed lying on its top, as it is on the screen, the side frames with the backing for the non existent axle boxes were only 1mm thick and had horizontal holes through them, which is particularly hard for the simpler printers to do, but it did them well enough to take the design further and add axleboxes and dummy springs. For anyone looking at 3D printing it took 17 minutes to print that, that was once I'd figured out how to draw it and probably about an hour with the mouse. Last week Aldi was offering a printer with similar capacity to mine for £299 if you were darned quick, the second time I looked they were all sold out, but the prices are definitely falling. As the fingers get stiffer drawing and printing is definitely a way to keep modelling.