3d printers

I got a DaVinci 1 for Christmas. It's a single-color that prints in ABS filament, and the guys have printed several layout items already. 

Cons: It's heavy and makes noises that sound as if Spinal Tap is trying to tune up while trapped in a shoebox.

Single-color printing. This is less of a problem for buildings, because you can always swap colors between walls and roof, for instance.

We're not that good at the software yet. Apparently, neither are most new users, because we've downloaded designs from Thingiverse and XYZWare that glitches and left us with piles of blue spaghetti. The figure we tried to print is either a mummy or a zombie. Most of what we get does work, though, and the designers are giving away the work, so it's hard to complain.

Relatively small print area and slow operation: ours is about 6x7" and a small flat object (keychain, etc.) takes about an hour to print. Not all printers are this slow and some are much, much larger. Size isn't as critical in 1:48 anyway because many of the items we'd want are very small. That also cuts down on printing time.

Pros:

Tremendous flexibility in what you can build. If you can imagine it and it's plastic, in theory you can build it. 

Little layout items are easy now. Need pallets, picnic tables, barrels, a luggage cart...? No problem.

Annoying little household items that you forget while shopping are easy (paper towel holder, spindle for TP roll, pen holder, small vase...) There is also a wide selection of cat and dog toys shaped like the commercial styrene ones but built from ABS, which is a whole lot stronger. (Lucas has had his ball for almost two weeks and hasn't killed it yet.)

The most amazing things I've seen so far are the customizable cat or dog wheelchair (about $7 for all-thread and lightweight wheels) and the power-assisted knee brace. With my weak ACL and arthritis, that's especially interesting to me because we have a lot of stairs.

Bigger projects are possible and some may be possible only because of home printing. I can't imagine enough people would want OR&W Leaky Roof boxcars to make a manufacturer's run worthwhile.

we know we'll want a father, fancier printer someday, but we needed one to start with. What we've got works very well for that.

The software for design and the design process itself will be the deal breaker, not the hardware. Unless you are already a professional designer with access to expensive software that is. Maybe someday we will all be able to do it affordably, but I think it will be a while.

I am taking some 3d cad classes at the moment.  For a project for last semester I created a 3d model in Autocad and then printed it.  The subject was a 100 ton roller bearing freight car truck.  It was printed at 1/10th actual size, yielding a model that about 11" long.  Parts were printed on a $75,000 Stratasys printer owned by the school, utilizing ABS filament.  The only reason the truck was printed at 1/10th scale as opposed to 1/48 was the practical constraint of printing some of the smaller parts like the springs.

Here are some photos:

The resolution is not quite there yet.

What Dave said

That is so cool! Now all you need to do is make another one, then the 1/10 86-foot Excess Height Box car to go on top of it.

The platform, figure, barrels, stepping stones, pallets and house all came from our printer. I'd have trimmed off the rough edges, but the guys didn't want to.

I bought a 3D printer from Quant and it has been awesome!

Ihave had a ball printing away making pilot spacers and coupker shims to convert to Kadee couplers.  Check my history for posts in the topic and here are some videos. 

Feel free to contact me with any questions, inckuding a contact on where to get one.

The resolution is good, and I have it set to normal, not fine.  It can be sanded and/or filled to make it super smooth. 

Thanks,

Mario

We have a Makerbot 2.0 with upgrades to twprint heads.  I am very satsified with it.  Cost about $2K about 14 months ago. 

If you all are doing that well without knowing the software yet, I think I am changing my mind on these things and the software.

Really?  So those entire O scale trolley body shells, underbodies, etc. off Shapeways from Imperial Hobby Productions aren't....???

Looked pretty good last Aug. when I saw them.

That's simply not true.  Autocad 123D is essentially free, and it is quite usable for

many model train projects.  Working on one now. For me, the biggest

limitation is the resolution of ABS/PLA filament printers. It will just get

better as things progress.

All of those objects are downloaded .stl files from Thingiverse and/or XYZWare's libraries. It's almost as easy as downloading and printing a text file. He did paint the window frames in the house, by the way. I wish the roof had been laid out to take advantage of the "stripe" effect instead of using the random-swirl pattern.

We got TurboCAD and the tutorial DVD (you can see it for free online, but there's the bandwidth issue again) so we can do our own designs. If you only want to print something from the Net, that's no problem at all.

I'm beginning to see that, see my post further down after seeing what B,T&G Morgan did without knowing much about their software. I will look into the Acad 123D program.

For a "few" bucks more, you can print a cobra...

http://www.cnet.com/news/3d-pr...bra-makes-its-debut/

It only took 24 hours to print.  

This is all so fascinating to me.  I'd say you folks got really good results, and I thank you for opening up some eyes and pushing this topic a little further along.

Also, to "bigtrain":  That truck is very impressive!