3D Printing: Projects

[Richard08]

Excellent results! Great to see this 'new branch' of modelling coming of age.

[mattmay05]

Not been here for a while... so next victim...

KR model's shambles, the Bulleid Leader.
There is a lot wrong with this model, and I won't bore you with it but for £185 it leaves a lot to be desired... but you can see my review below:
https://youtu.be/y22M3amhsto

So I am going to just show the bottom end of my rebuild but it does go a lot further.. So knowing this model was going to be awful...I started designing parts 2/3 years ago... and once it had arrived I could adjust dimension's, and tweak it where necessary.

And this is what I had in January...


So guard irons which were completely missing, so printed, painted, and glued behind the bufferbeam, and yes I know red paint, well ahead of you... even though according to Keith they were never red... despite including a colour photo of it outside Eastleigh with a red buffer beam.... yea...




After I decided to totally disassemble the model to make it easier to work on the bogies, as I was going to do a lot of work on these two units.
So next was to extract the wheels, which on the face of it they looked ok, but they were more American wheels rather than the BFB pattern.. again this was nothing to do with cost, its just lack of research.. despite a book of photos of the wheels on or off, or fallen off..
So back to the printed, I designed and printed some inserts for the wheels, which filled the holes and gave it a better look, and I also painted them... also before anyone says it, yes the wheels were loose so I have added some glue to the axles, so I hope they don't fall off again... Fingers crossed!




While the bogie frame and keeper plate was off the model, I added the missing steam heat pipe from Wizard models, made by 51L and of course that missing red paint.. which never existed I have also made back in January a screwlink coloupling as the model came with a coupling with an instanter type coupling... anyway I will be replacing my screwlink with the correct Bulleid type screwlink when it arrives.




Next big job...
The fictitious oscillating valve gear, this originally ran with the locomotive, then had a cover, then cover removed, then the oscillating removed altogether which I think is what is supposed to be depicted.. although not well. So I tried some covers first to cover the representation, but found actually everything was in the wrong place... which was annoying..
I then decided to removed the front facing cylinder opening, and change it all for the 3D printed ones, which includes cylinder, valve gear, and a cover if required.

Here's a sequence of photos:






While under the bogie frames, again rather lacking in detail and accessories, no brake rigging at all so, through my draw of etches, from Mainly Trains/Wizard Models, I carefully, drilled holes in the bottoms of the brake hangers and made some brake rigging up from the etches... I will admit this was expensive (The etches) so I may see if I can develop some 3D printed brake rigging, to make it easier and cheaper for others, as two lots of these etches was close to £40...
This later was chemically blackened and painted, and fitted to the bogie.




Next small detail missing was the anchor points for hoists and cranes for when the bogie bogies were being lifted of moved around the works.. they certainly are rather large almost being the size of the terrier... these were 3D printed, and painted then fitted on the above the buffer beam. Simple detail but helps the look. They were fixed in position with some varnish.




Lastly, I think.... the mid section, where the ashpan and steam reverser are. Again detail, shape, and size were somewhat... well lacking on all fronts. The reverser was over sized in my view and mounted in the wrong place, the bracket was there but not used... just weird.
The Ashpan, was just a hollow bit of plastic with no details, no rivets no bolts or nuts, no hoppers, nothing just a plain piece of black plastic in the sort of shape of an ashpan...
So this was the last piece I designed for the Leader model this was early May 2025. Using the book with reference photos, which showed a fair bit I could design using the model as a base then tweaking it to fit, I produced a few new parts which did enhance this area a fair bit. Both painted and fitted in to place I was quite happy with the result.





Next I will focus on the body shell, till then bye for now!