Continuing Saga …

That's what made me think of your possibility too...

I wrote a post last night, but was interrupted by #2 grandson with a diorama project. It's that time of the year again. My post timed out and I lost most of the pictures. It was too late to start over so tonight is a two-for. 

I got the filler strips weathered and installed. I finished the P&P RR signage for the Engine House (EH) and today installed it. Grew some more machine tools. Made scale-looking personnel doors. Then I helped grandson design a model of an Irish house where the author of Angela's Ashes lived. I had some styrene furnishing, but we needed to find more on SU and make them on the Machine. I spent this morning drawing up plans for him and correcting some printing errors.

The filler strips are in and look decent. I added more grease stains since this is the part that's under the engines. Of course I ran into a minor complication. There are feeder wires soldered to the siding tracks now in the EH. I didn't realize how much they interfered until I was in the process of hot gluing the strips in place and there were these large bumps that pushed the filler above the tops of the power rail. I had to take them into the shop and grind relief into the undersides of the MDF and actually remove some of the styrene packing. Meanwhile, hot glue is annoying! It often cooled too much before I got the strip situated and I had to scrape all the hardened glue off the ties and start over. This only happened in two out of the six strips. After gluing down the strips, I put the EH back on it moorings and permanently fastened the bumpers in place with the contact adhesive strips. I tested them and it holds like crazy.

I was going to just grow some crash bars hardware for my personnel doors, but when I looked at the SU doors that I had downloaded they were complete with crash bars, door closures, outside handles… the works. I decided to grow them and see how they would turn out. 

They grew well, but they're very thin and warped like crazy making them unusable. Or so I thought. The door closures, even though I doubled their thickness, were too thin to survive very long. The warpage was awful

I thought about cutting away the crash bars and just using them, but they too wouldn't have survived the mayhem. So I tried laminating these doors to the inside of my scratch-built ones. The dimensions were dead on. The printer prints accurately.

I had to clamp them to straighten them out a bit, but even so they were still a bit warped. But it worked. After painting, they look remarkably real. The crash bars on one double door cracked, but I was able to mend them with Bondic. If you're going to do resin printing, make sure you get Bondic too.

Here's a door sitting in a machine shop wall. Even without those microscopic closure arms, the door works!

I first tried to pad paint the signage with gloss black, but the sponge pad I was using was too soft and was contacting the base surface also. I went to Plan B: using Bare Metal adhesive backed aluminum. It was time consuming, but rewarding. I use the technique suggested on the instructions: you carefully lift a lip of the foil off the backing and then fasten this to a slip of paper. You go to the other side of the piece you're using and do the same. You then lift the foil off the backing with these strips.

If you're foolhardy enough to try to just lift the foil with a tweezers, it will be immediately curl back on itself and generally ends up in a mess. Using the paper gives good control and lets you carry the foil to where it's needed. At first I was burnishing the foil down hard and then trimming with a new #11 blade. This made it difficult to almost impossible to remove the scrap, and I was scratching the base color. I modified my approach to just putting the foil in place and fastening it to the letter's top only so I could clearly see the outline. After trimming I went back with a Q-tip and burnished down the edges. The results were gratifying.

Today, I marked out the EH and, using 3M99 high strength spray adhesive, I affixed the signage to the building.

I'm designing the exterior lighting. I'm going to have three units mounted to the roof directed at each door. This will also serve to illuminate the signage. I also want lighting over each personnel door. I'm going to grow the fixtures to specifically accommodate the surface mount LEDs that I'm using so much. I also bought two 12 VDC 30 watt units that will be most capable of powering whatever lighting is going to be at that end. I bought two since I'll need more for other uses as well.

And… the ultrasonic cleaner (USC) arrived yesterday and immediately went to work. I now have a fully equipped resin printing work station. The unit is noisy, but it works great. I cleaned my air brush and it worked well. I also cleaned my watch band and it was filthy. I cleaned everything the Machine put out. I'm still using the two-alcohol baths, but for shorter time. I then run it through the USC for about 6 minutes. The unit has temperature and time controls.

I put some aluminum screen in the main basket so little parts don't fall through.

I'm getting itchy to finally build the gantry. All my ducks are lined up in a row. My older grandson visited us yesterday after coming back from being the sailing counselor at his sleep away camp in Wisconsin. He started University of Illinois next week. He immediately said that I should have mechanized the crane and then suggest that I could rig up a cable system to at least drag it back and forth. I think that train has left the station. If I was to do that, it would have had to be before the girders were epoxied in place.

Just for your edification, here's all the little bits that we grew for grandson's diorama. We grew a bed and table, but they seemed to large for the floor space, so I shrunk them a bit and dit it over. The wood stove in the foreground was a disaster. I had to redraw a lot of it so it would work and I enlarged it a bit since it was just too small to be noticed. We were able to download some 3D people STLs and they printed beautifully. I also found that I can orbit around the images in the slicer by using the two-finger track pad move on my MacBook Pro. Not the easiest of moves, but I was getting frustrating by only looking the top-front-and left side of the objects. I also designed an printed a set of stairs to make the build go faster. He has to have it done by mid-week.

It's coming along great, Myles. I love  the crash bars on the doors.

Myles, your pictures tell a Wonderful story, we’re looking forward to seeing your work in person. Have a great weekend. Thanks for your contribution to this fantastic hobby...Your Friends from Tennessee and Kentucky.....

What they all said!!!  The crash bars on the blue doors...they look perfect, as does everything else!!

Sheesh! I go on vacation for ten days and can't believe all that I've missed here.

Great work!!!

Seriously, I can't believe all that's gone on for the last 10 days either. My grandson and I worked all weekend on his English project. He needs it for the first day of class which is Tuesday. It had to be a project based on a book he read over the summer. He read "Angela's Ashes", so he wanted to build a replica of their small Limerick, Ireland row house. The scene he was duplicating was their Christmas dinner where all they had was the head of a pig. The house was tiny and the first floor was flooded. We built the house in O'scale since I had some plastic furniture to use. We also made terrific use of the Machine. It really is remarkable! A little over a month ago, I didn't even know such a machine was possible and now I've had it running almost every day.

I also designed and grew the steep staircase. Jack did the floor out of stripped 1/32 balsa.

The house made use of some left over Grandt Line doors and windows, and some brick paper I bought from MicroMark years and years ago. I bought it before I had settled on my methods for doing scratch-built projects. The shingles were the last of my Rusty Stumps lot, but Rail Scale is now marketing them.

I drew the plans on CorelDraw. Jack cut the parts out of 1/8 foam core. I did the exterior work and Jack did all the interior work. He'll pick up the finished house tomorrow.

I continued to refine the Printing Station with the addition of digital timer that will manage the UV Chamber. I've already over-baked two projects after putting them in the chamber and forgetting to get them out. They get brownish and very brittle. I can still use them, but they become much harder to handle. Now I set 10 minutes on the timer and leave it alone.

I've also gotten a line on a flexible resin that when added to the one I now use will impart some impact strength and cut down on the brittle breakage of the finer details.

I wanted to add lighting to the engine house and designed a goose neck affair. I wanted to have it fixed to the roof so I could tie the power into the roof system. I grew the base and the head and will use 1/16" aluminum tubing for the pipe. It's the same tubing I used on the Woodbourne Gallery and Nighthawks exterior lights. 

I wanted to be clever. I designed the parts so the all the holes would be grown in. It took three tries. The first I had the head and base on the platen flat and using light support. I also included one pig, since the Machine doesn't care how much stuff is on the layer. It's just an imaging process. 

The heads printed okay, but the supports were up inside making cleanup troublesome since that's where the LED is going to nest. The pig came out great, and the bases all broke loose for their supports. They were just a flat blob cemented to the FEP film at the vat's bottom. I thought I was going to have to replace the film since they seemed really attached. After removing and filtering the resin back into its bottle and cleaning up the vat, I attempted to remove the stuck resin and was successful by just gently picking up one corner and the pieces just popped off. There was no apparent damage to the film and the Machine printed successfully two more times.

The second attempt grew nicely by positioning the pieces on the 45. The heads were perfect, but the bases again failed, but this time due to my SketchUp design. I didn't group the center hollow mounting peg (1/4" o.d.) and the pipe holder together. Instead, I drew them together with the housing. The result was a hollow housing with the center lug contacting the bottom surface only. Since a surface has absolutely no thickness, as soon as I removed the supports the lug fell off.

Back to the drawing board. I then grouped the tubing parts. Drew the box around them and grouped that. This time, the box grew as a solid resin piece. The lug was formed perfectly with a hole all the way inside. The pipe tube's hole ended at the front face of the housing, but that's okay since I was able to drill it through to communicate with the lug's hole. I enlarged the pipe hole anyway since at exactly 1/16" the tubing would be a press fit and would break stuff. By going to a #52 drill I have a couple of thou clearance.

Speaking of a couple of thou. One of the tests of a resin printer is how close it produces objects to their intended size. I measured the .250" lug and it came out to .251". That one thou could have been the accuracy of the Chinese digital caliper, or it could just as easily have been the rounding error since 1 divided by 48 is 0.02083 not .021. Either way, it's pretty darn close to perfect reproduction. This is attempt #2. Notice the housing sitting flat on the cutting pad.

Here's the total production of good ones. I had a couple of failures when the tubing cracked due to over-aggressive drilling. I found that it was better to do the drilling with the Dremel. The resin doesn't get hot or melt like thermoplastics. I need five heads and bases for the engine house. All the rest of the heads are going to be good-looking modern LED street lights. More anachronistic mind warps on my railroad. I still have to try and build some using the surface mount LEDs. The chamber is not that large. The magnet wire takes up very little space, but needs to be packaged carefully.

I used a contour of Bondic around the tube exits on the housings and the heads. I may have to use a small burr to clean out the LED chamber to ensure sufficient room for the LEDs and their solder joints.

I also received the two LED power supplies that I am using to power all the new lighting. These are 12VDC, 30 watt units that will power lots of LEDs. The HVAC unit is the one I'm building for my son's nephew. I'm going to make some custom decals that say, "Liam's HVAC Company" or something to that effect.

And finally, I took advantage of a Harbor Freight sale and bought a portable metal cutting band saw and an angle grinder. I really need more equipment to do the plane restoration justice. These tools will reduce my net since I'm not getting paid for tools that will remain mine, but I've wanted a means to cut metal more efficiently for years to prepare parts for turning. I hate using a hand hack saw. I also bought another digital caliper. They were on sale for 10 bucks and it includes two button batteries. They're almost worth price of the caliper. My current one was getting a little worn. I'll keep it for a spare and throw out the one that it replaced. Anybody want an old parallel port HP Laserjet printer? I don't even have a computer that has a parallel port. What the heck is a parallel port anyway? I have vague memories of them. And the box its sitting on is an old Pixma printer that's already at the Louisville electronic disposal facility.

When I first started buying power tools at Harbor Freight I was a little put off by everything being of Chinese manufacture. Now I see that regardless of the brand, including Milwaukee, their stuff is made in China too. So what's the difference. Is my 10 dollar caliper on par with a Starrett. Heck no! But when it wears out I get another for 10. That can go one for quite a while. If I was a professional machinist, I'd probably stick with the Starrett.

Myles 

The say the details will make the project and you sure have nailed it. Your new printer is making a big difference in quickly completing the engine house scene. Creating repetitive details are is no longer a time consuming problem.

Where did your grandson get those figures? Really nice, you could have used some of those on your "Nighthawks Cafe" project, You and your grandson are a great team in producing some realistic modeling.

Gerry

Myles, The project with your grandson looks great!!  It reminds me of projects our daughters did in school.  They made the rough design, I suggested materials and showed them methods.  They took it from there.  At one time we had a portion of the Great Wall of China and the Roman Coliseum in our attic, to name a few.

The new work with the printer is amazing for sure.  Some day that will be taken for granted.

 I do the same with tools I won’t use much.  I figure the tool will outlive me.

My grandkids are going to inherit one helluva shop if they want it.

Yesterday I got the engine house powered up with the new LED power supply spending a lot of time on my creeper under the platform and I feel it today. It's been 20 years since I actually started building this monster and things change physically over that length of time. I have a power strip (actually three of them) feeding all the various stuff the layout requires. I plugged the LED power into the one nearest that end of the layout and then stretched its power cord even further to reduce the amount of hookup wire I would need to reach my target. I use big brass ground bars that are normally used in electrical service cabinets to connect all the +s and -s up. The lighting was strong and looked good.

I then spent the rest of the afternoon trying to get the trains running into and out of the new facility. The tracks were really dirty and the engines were being very uncooperative. In fact, they were a complete pain in the butt. I'm still working on that problem. Even though my gigantic, out-of-scale, Ross track is more forgiving than say HO or N regarding track cleanliness, it does have its limits and I believe I passed them. I need to install something more substantial on the EH roof so I can lift it without damaging any of the appurtenances that reside on it. Right now I'm lifting it by the smoke jacks, but that's really risky.

Today, I'm getting the shop early and will make some significant headway on the gantry which I started on saturday when working downstairs with grandson.

I also, with the help of Jean Vincent, my Lyonaisse compatriot, finished (finally) drawing the two massive Roots blowers that grace the back end of the 567 prime mover. I will now add the flywheel and finish up the rest of the front end. Then it's onto designing the main generator and exciter and working out the print schedule.

When finished, they were a bit too large so I scale them back to 90% overall and a bit more on length and now they're pretty close. I wish I had a scaled drawing of this engine. It would have made it much easier to draw. As it is, I've been guesstimating all of the dimensions. We finally worked out that crazy geometry of the plenums below the blowers. I still have the mufflers and exhaust piping, but I'm not anticipating any trouble with that. The blowers were the singularly most complex SketchUp drawing I've ever tackled. I have to decide how many separate pieces I want to grow. By separating into smaller sub-assemblies, I can perfect the printing scheme more closely. Won't take any more print time since they're all going to fit on the Machine at the same time (except for the block)

Great nite time picture of you r engine house, quite realistic. The nite time pictures are fabulous. I don't think its been 20 years since I've began following your build, but I think its the first time I've seen your control panel lit up. the diesel engine will definitely add to the detail of the engine house.

Send me an email concerning the flexible resin, my number is listed in my profile.

Gerry

The lighting on the engine house looks fantastic. I can't wait to see the engine after it's been printed.

Thanks Gerry and Pat! If you recall I had written about part of the 567 cylinder head detail not printing way back when I was first experimenting with the Machine. Today, after watching a SketchUp tutorial on speeding up the display I was exploring the Styles tab and found a way to make those pesky reversed faces more obvious. I changed them from the default light green to bright red. Just for fun I went back and evaluated the 567 drawing. Everything looked okay until I peered more closely into that complicated valve area. I found out quickly why things like the cylinder head clamps didn't print. It wasn't due to my positioning or supports. It was due to the sides of the clamps being bright red. Those faces were reversed. So were the cams, the cam bearings and both ends of the rocker arms. I drew this before I learned that the STL conversion software doesn't register reversed faces. The bright red makes the reversed face pop. I fixed them all and now am excited to see how it really prints.

I got the gantry girders including rails built today. I also made a jerry rigged scheme to raise the EH roof and hold it there while working on it. I got the machine shop roof covered and started on the rain gutters. And finally I put the bells on the stack bottoms. I also sliced my left index finger in a bone-headed mishap.

Here's the lifting rig for the roof. Stupidly simple.

After I get it all lined out, I'll remove it, but leave the holes. I was lifting it by the stacks, and while they were holding, it was very tenuous. The prop does a nice job holding the roof open so I can work inside.

I had already glued one 1/4" sq piece that formed the top filler for the gantry girder, but I needed to check it against the trucks on the main rails. I found that I just needed to relieve the angular beam portion so the girder would lie nice and flat and not push the trucks outwards.

I was confident that the sizes were correct so I built the girders. They consist of the two sides and several pieces of 1/4" stock to space the girder sides. After gluing all the pieces on one side, I clamped the second side on and glued it all up. 

After they were dry enough I trued all their edges so they could receive the flanged that boxed in all four sides. I have a piece of medium grit sandpaper glued to a granite surface plate that I use for all my flat surfacing operations. I hold the workpiece up to an angle square to ensure that the surfaces are not only flat, but also square.

The flange extends 0.040" on each side. I measured the width of the native girder and two pieces of 0.040" stock and measured this stack with the caliper. I transferred this to the 0.040" sheet stock and scribed the width. I scribed the strips with a long straight edge and an model knife with a #11 blade. It was doing that that got my index finger. I was having trouble with the tail end moving slightly and needed to apply more pressure. I noticed my thumb was close to the edge and moved it towards the straight edge center. What I didn't notice was that my index finger was actually hanging over the edge and drew the blade into it. Work then abruptly stopped! Being an Eliquis user, my blood clots slowly. I find that with a clean cut, direct pressure for a few minutes works well to keep bleeding minimized. I then hit it with some clean IPA, and then New Skin liquid bandage followed up with two layers of tight bandaids to keep the pressure on.

Then I got back to work.

After gluing on all the flanges I went back and trued them up, trimmed the angle pieces and prepared them to receive the rails. You can see that very little relief notch at the ends.

The hoist rail is some S-guage scale rail from a chunk that Roundhouse Trains gave me gratis. It was a piece of scrap. I cut them to length and epoxied them with 6 minute epoxy clamped to the table edge.

And here's a neat tip: I don't know where I picked this up. As a quick and disposal mixing pallet I've started using a piece of Press-n-Seal food wrap. You stick it to the table. Put the epoxy or paint or whatever on it. Mix it up, use it and then peel it off and throw it away. I also use it to seal my air brush paint bottles when their flimsy lid gaskets deteriorate. Put it on the bottle, stretch it and the screw on the cap.

I tried the hoist on to check the spacing vis a vis how the girders fit over the trucks. It fits. I'll do the final gluing of girders to trucks while the trucks are sitting on their rails. I'm going to glue some spacers between the rails to make it easier to position for the final assembly.

There are some bumper stops that I need to craft although I could grow them. In fact maybe I will. I'll combine them with some 567 prints so I'm not wasting machine time.

I used the same duct tape on the machine shop roof as I did on the main roof. The back door light is going to be tied into the foil wiring under this roof. For the main roof I'm going to run another circuit.

\

The last thing I accomplished was to glue the bells on the exhaust stacks thus finishing the roof.

I was working on the gutters I ran out of time.

Simple is best!  That is a great arrangement!  The hoist girders are looking great already!

Progress continues on several fronts. Got the machine shop gutters built. Received my UV curing chamber turntable. Successfully grew both the gantry track bumper, and more importantly, got a great part for the 567 blowers. All that time spent on perfecting the drawings paid off! I glued the gantry girders together and came up with a fair method to make the machine shop roof movable.

I used a piece of floral wire to figure out the curve in the machine shop downspouts. I bent the curves as I did with other projects using the K-S spring wire small tube bender. I soldered it together with the RSU and soldered in some 0.032" brass wire that will tie the gutter to the building. I then cleaned the joints in the Ultrasonice cleaner. For just a few seconds the metal was spotless. I wish it was bigger. I could only do the end, but that's where cleaning was needed most.

I used the JAX chemicals to first turn it dark bronze and then add the patina. You don't really know the patina is working, but you just have to let it dry and then, there it is.

I put the gutter on the building and it shows up well. I'm not happy with the way the white roofing is going up building. It's acting as a light block and the hinge to let me open the roof. But I didn't get it very even. I'm going to trim it tomorrow. There's also a strip inside and double layer outside. There's a little leakage, but it's tolerable. The gutters are going directly into the ground to a subterranean storm drain so I didn't have to bend the lower end.

I put some H-beam plastruct between the girders to glue them together. Their spacing is a bit narrow, but it doesn't matter since I'm going to epoxy the hoist to the rails. My small razor saw miter box is worn out and the cut guides are so wide that it no longer produces square cuts.

I quickly designed the bumpers on SketchUp and then staged them with the 567 Roots Blowers to grow them all at once. If it's going to take a few hours, I might as well get as much grown as I can.

The bumpers are a bit large. I added a chamfered base which made them wider and longer than I measured. So some careful filing I got them to fit nicely.

And here's the Piece de Resistance. The blowers were the essential part of the engine that had to be nailed to make the whole deal work. 

The print is so precise that the slight variations in the plenum surface show up. I can do so minor sanding and smooth it out even more.

I got back to work on the front end and found out why the hand throttle lever didn't print. It didn't print for the same reason as the cylinder hold down clamps. There was a significant portion that had reversed faces. On the lever, it was the section right at the junction between the arm and the hub. It took a while to rectify. I had to remove the part from the engine. Copy it to its own file, scale it up 100X and then fix it. Shrink it back to 1:1 scale and put it back on the engine. When you're dealing with small details in SU, it works much better when you enlarge it… a lot.

The turntable is an AC powered unit so I don't have worry about buying batteries. I'm going to by a multi-outlet for the timer and have the UV light and the turntable run by it. It makes for a more even hardening. I spread some PSA on the turntable and stuck on some aluminum foil so its reflective like the rest of the box.

More and more nice!

And the rendering of the blowers is perfect!

jp

The blowers turned out great.

Happy Monday!

Friday, I had the pleasure of entertaining Larry Levin, Charlie, John and Richard from Western Tenn to see the layout and all the projects. We didn't have much time, but we made it matter. Of course, the one train that I wanted to run derailed going into the tunnel. The hinge wasn't properly aligned and the slight rail misalignment derailed the trailing A unit.

I also have my friend's son here for a camouflage painting clinic on Sunday. He's 9 and has been visiting my workshop since he was five. He built a nice little 1/72 Spitfire and wanted to know how to paint it. I showed him how to mask, when to mask and how he could use brush paints to do a nice job.

Meanwhile, I spent the weekend designing and re-designing the 567, printing out the first major test run of the entire project and then this morning, making the corrections to solve the few problems that cropped up. The nice thing about resin printing is you just make the changes and do it again. By the next day you'll have the new part. It's called "rapid prototyping" and it works.

Here are the final images of the completed engine with the full front and rear end details. I'm not attempting to have the printer do the fuel lines. They're only a 1/4" in 1:1 which is 0.005" in scale. I know the printer would attempt it, but it would disappear in you hands. For that size you need photo etched brass or magnet wire. And you'd have to drill a .005" hole. Nope! Ain't gonna happen.

Here were some of the pieces as grown. I chose to grow the entire front and rears as since pieces. It worked quite well. There were several problems. The fuel filter was actually in contact with the front plate on the drawing and after growing was just floating there hanging on a support. 

I chose to print the open head with the valve cover attached. It worked!. Also, all of the missing pieces are now there including the injector rack attached to the throttle shaft. All the cylinder hold-downs are there too. The blower end worked great including all of the oil lines. The flywheel is also contiguous with the rest.

The throttle shaft sticking out of cylinder head should be sticking out of the front plate. As such, the hand throttle lever wasn't connected to anything. Because its lower end fused to the water pump, it's holding its geometry, but it's wrong.

I assembled all the parts with CA. Because of the ledge that's holding the open valve cover sticks into the exhaust manifold space, the forward manifold didn't sit down far enough. I modified the valve cover hinge to give enough relief that the manifold will seat properly. I only slapped some Tamiya primer to show the detail. Painting inside the valve area will take a steady hand. The color is basically "oily". Even with the errors, it's one helluva model.

The rear is impressive too. On the front I had made an extended back that would nestle into the block's cavity. It was way too tight of a fit and overkill. I had to do a lot of grinding and filing to get it together and it was still not right. I redesigned this boss out. It will now be a flat plate like the rear.

Here are some close ups of the errors. You can see the rack connections to the injectors in this pic.

I spent today finalizing the design for the generator. The model can be posed with or without the generator attached.

I didn't just work on the 567. I glued the trucks and end stops onto the main gantry bridge. I had to cut some relief for the axle boxes. When I went with the larger hoist mechanism, it pushed the girders apart a bit and put them in contact with the inner axle boxes. I suppose I could have lengthened the trucks, but I was lazy. As it is, for the time I spent fussing I probably could have.

To put the trucks in place while the epoxy was curing I put the trucks on the rails, applied the 6-minute epoxy to the girders, put them in contact with the trucks and then weighed it down until it cured.

There was considerable epoxy overage surrounding the secondary rails. I wanted to remove it before painting. I scribed the rail edges with a single-edged razor and then scraped all the excess off. I then started the process to glue the railings on. I going to epoxy them, and start with holding in place with tape, then tack with CA and finally I'll add the epoxy. Once the railings are on, I can paint the bridge and start preparing the hoist and hook. Railings will go in tomorrow.

If there is any interest in having your own 567, please let me know by private eMail.

Myles,

Will you be building a second gantry crane?  Most engine servicing facilities use two to lift the engines.

Jan

Myles,

The 567 engine is just beautiful. Impressive work as always and should be displayed in a glass case on your mantle not hidden in the engine house.

Did you grow the railings for your gantry?

Gerry

Really a masterpiece! 

As it has been said: don't hide this part!

jp

Rmyles, that 567 looks fantastic.

Thanks guys!

I believe I will make a display version for viewing under glass. The railings are laser cut adhesive backed laser board. It consists of three layers with the one with the lattice comprising the middle. I hadn't thought about building another crane, but you're right. They have more than one. All I would need for a second one is have Rail Scale cut some more railings. All the rest of the parts I can grow or scratch-build. I'd make some changes in building the second one. With the removable roof, I can add the second crane anytime I want.

Oh I remember now you described the construction  before. LOL see I told you didn't I?

Well guys, ever since I started reading the stories from the thread of “Continuing Saga”, I have been amazed at his work, (Myles) his attention to detail, his high tech thinking, his high tech ability to produce so many fine structures for his fantastic layout. Farmerjohn, myself, Leapin Larry, Charles Lentz, and Rich Hane we’re fortunate to have an on-site Visit with Myles, the gentleman writing the Continuing Saga. What made it possible was Myles mentioning that he shopped at a great hobby shop, The Roundhouse, in Louisville Kentucky. That’s where I shop when it’s convenient as it’s a 4 hour drive from my place in Clarksville Tennessee. So, I sent an email to Myles and he said we were welcome to come to his home. Wow, we were so excited that he would allow us some time for visiting and learning some great ways to add details to our layouts. We can only say, his layout is an inspiration that words can not describe. Here are a few pictures taken Friday while visiting. This is a post to follow as it will be a fantastic learning experience and if anyone on the forum wants to see this layout, just contact Myles, his email is in his profile. You’ll be Glad You did....Oh what a day it was....See if you can see a monster lurking in the water...We had a super great time, Thank You Myles.

I agree with the others about the great looking 567!  You have really learned a lot in a short time about the 3D printer and how to make the drawings it needs.  The engine house details are really shaping up!

Larry, thank you again for all the great photographs from your visit to Myles' home and layout!  I have never been to Louisville, but it seems it has become a destination!!

Thank you Larry and all your friends. Living with the layout for so many years, I sometimes need outside eyes to remind me just how special it is to be able to build and enjoy something like this. As a kid I really dreamed about having a big train set. I tend to be one of those kinds of people that when I set my mind on something it really doesn't matter how long it takes, I will eventually make it happen.

I was jumping from one thing to another today. The Engine House has sort of entered the punch list phase. I got the gantry railing on, primed the gantry and then air brushed it with Tamiya yellow. I found out why the one pump on the 567's gear front didn't print right, corrected it and printed another. I also fixed the engine block. The lower mounting rails were too thin and were breaking. I also had one set of access hatches moved too deeply into the surface and they didn't look right. Fixed that too. I revised and reprinted the hoist carriage to solve two problems. It was too wide for my rail spacing. 

It wasn't the problem of the carriage. It was the spacers that I used to separate the gantry girders. My miter box is so worn that it no longer comes out square. When I squared them up on my Precision Sander, they were no longer the length that they were supposed to be. So when I glued the beams together with the spacers, it was no longer in gauge with the carriage. I also wanted to change the cable spool to make it so I could load it with "cable" more easily than feeding the string around by hand. I separated the spool and added a stub on the end that can go in the lathe. I also found some reversed faces that had escaped me when I first grew this part way back when the printer was new.

The pump printed badly because it wasn't actually touching the gear case face. It was sitting proud by a very small amount, but it was enough to create printing problems. It was actually touching by the bolts that were sticking out from the pump's back face. The bolts I used on some of the parts were actually fully formed objects. In other places I used just a bolt head. There was enough of the bolt touching the surface that kept the pump from not forming at all. I fixed this problem too.

I painted the gantry outside using Tamiya white primer since white is the best color to have under yellow. I brought it inside to dry.

I tacked the railing at key spots with medium CA, and then went back and epoxied the rest using the 6 minute epoxy. Before priming I did a thorough scraping and cleaning of any residual glue on the girder's flanks. I then wiped it with IPA to make it ready for paint.

While the yellow was completely drying I put it into the engine house.

I wanted to bring my big (huge) Pennsy Q2 into the Engine House to check its height (it was a 16' tall loco) so I could determine how much overhead door could be exposed without getting whacked. I was backing it in and all went well until the engine was about 3/4 in and then "Clunk". Stopped dead running into something. I opened the gate and moved it by hand and "Clunk" stopped again. I thought it was running into the filler strip like the SD35 was, but it wasn't. It was impacting the door frame. Actually, just one tiny brass detail sticking out from the cylinder was catching the frame. I had to grind the frame about an 1/8" to give sufficient clearance. I tried it in the far door and it cleared. I didn't try it in the near door since there was the UP switcher sitting there.

I hate when that happens. And I'm still having conductivity problems on the engine house track.

I got a great print of the traction alternator. I made two. In order to hollow out the inside I cheated and made a separate plate to close the hole when it's assembled. I was able to grow the part with the commutator actually separate and below the outer frame. It's very hard to see in this picture, put tomorrow I finish cleaning it and prime it and you'll be able to see what I'm talking about. Again, I erred in making the mating surfaces the same size. The generator nests inside the flywheel's rim, but the i.d. of one is the same as the o.d. of the other and the machine is so accurate that this becomes a press fit and I don't what to press anything this fragile. It took me a half hour to draw those louvers (also almost invisible in this image).

I finished my son's nephew's AC unit. I wanted to print the text on decals. I first used some Microsol decal product that I thought was inkjet film. It wasn't! It was trim decal. You are just supposed to cut out shapes in it and then apply as a decal. It didn't work with inkjet ink. It didn't dry and smeared. When I put the decal sealer on it, the lettering just went all to ****. That's when I realized it wasn't a decal film. Then I found some of my white background film and some HP photo paper. I printed the text on both and decided to go with the photo paper. I fixed the ink with Final Fixative and the applied it with the PSA. My daughter in law was duly impressed.

I started assembling the first lighting unit for the engine house, but got side tracked when the printer was finished. I'll work on them tomorrow.

The last thing I did was to begin assembly of the overhead doors. It turns out that just a little bit will be exposed. These will be painted Coral Blue to match the other metal trim on the building. I'm going to add some channel on both sides of the door to simulate door track. Forgive me… the door turns out to be wider than the mechanism. The mechanism was created from the original SketchUp drawing. The as-built doors came out wide than the ones I drew on the version I used to take off the mechanism. That mechanism was a SketchUp download. No one will know (except you all).

That gantry looks great in that picture of the inside of the engine house. I was just thinking you could take the engine parts that didn't turn out right and paint and weather them and put them in a scrap gondola parked near the engine house.  

Thanks Pat! I'm going to do something like that. Unfortunately, I don't have an outside track next to the engine house. I could possibly squeeze one on the left side, but the right side is definitely not possible. I'm going to do something. It could be on a flatbed truck, sitting on some cribbing, etc. I've just printed a new generator. This one has shackles on top so it can be hung from the crane. I need to get a junk engine where I can remove all the model stuff and install an engine/generator with the middle covers removed. The crane could be above it with the generator hanging.

Speaking of generators. I painted one of the rejects to show off the multi-layered construction that the Machine grew for me. The shackles didn't print. I had downloaded them from SketchUp and of course half of the faces were reversed. I didn't catch it. DOH! It just costs more time and a little resin, but it's a pain. It's a shame that I'm modeling with a 36 segment circle since the printer picks up every one of them. You can model circles with any number of segments, but it takes more memory and CPU time to render. And of course, this is a close up. The generator is not that big. I mixed up some copper color with Tamiya Gold and clear red. I painted the inside from the outside and touched up the gray afterwards.

I re-touched some of the gantry's yellow. Reprinted the new hoist mechanism which fits very nicely. I also had repaired the hook's drawing so the cable guard actually printed correctly. I tried threading a thread around the sheave and under the guard and it worked. The thread is too fine a gauge. I'll get some correctly sized thread tomorrow.

I needed to rebuild the base of Liam's AC unit. The duct box was for some reason too high and while attempting to sand it down so the legs would touch the ground, they got damaged. I'm growing another leg set, but this time, the box is an integral part. I'm also growing a full 567 set (all at once). Last night's print of the front gear unit failed in a couple of places. The Woodward governor wasn't connected to anything. I checked the drawing and somehow that group of objects had moved slightly forward; just enough to make it not in contact with the front plate. When it's not in contact with a base, the print fails. The fuel filter also failed and I modified it's supports. It's now all growing and I'll see how it works tomorrow.

The last thing was to begin making the lighting system for the engine house. I figured how long the aluminum tube needed to be, cut the tubing with a micro saw, and bent it in a lever-action tubing bender. I threaded the green and red magnet wires through the tubing. I'm looking for an easier way of stripping the enamel off the magnet wire. Any suggestions?

I tested the surface mount LED out of the circuit and it worked. I then thread the tube into the light head and used some medium CA to secure it. I tinned the LED and, after scraping the enamel off the wire, I tinned them and joined the two. The light again tested okay so I pulled the magnet wire and snuggled the LED into the light head cavity. I applied Bondic to pot the lamp into the head and insulate the wires. I then threaded the base onto the tubing with its wires. I also potted the wires into the base so they wouldn't pull. I then tested it one more time in preparation to take a picture. It worked three times until it didn't!

Don't know what happened. I checked the power supply on another free LED and it lit so the power supply was okay. I'm going to stop testing them with a lead with a current limiting resistor and start using the CL2N3 LED driver chip since it would perform well regardless of input voltage.

Even though the thing didn't work and I'm going to have to scrap it since I won't be able to extricate the burnt out LED from the head due to the Bondic, it still looks pretty good. I have extra heads so I'll be able to make more. These fixtures are going to make great street lamps hanging from a telephone pole.

So today wasn't as sexy as others, but progress was still made.

Trainman2001 posted:

I'm looking for an easier way of stripping the enamel off the magnet wire. Any suggestions? 

You don't need to strip the enamel at all. Just solder it with the enamel still there--it will vaporize from the heat of the solder.

If I didn't know better, I would think that was a picture of a 1:1 generator. I've done some soldering with magnet wire. I put the wire on the bench and rub it with an emery board.

Thanks for the tips. I did apply solder directly to the wire and, yes, it did remove the insulation. Another multi-task day. With all these punch list items, I find myself jumping from one thing to another. I had to concentrate. The Gantry is effectively finished except for a load to hang on the hook and some decaling showing the tonnage capacity. I'm out of decal film and will have to get some. I finally printed a complete 567 front end with all the parts where they should be, but ended up with a back end lacking a flywheel and broke off the oil lines from the blower's bottom. One of these days, I will get all the parts done correctly and create a perfect engine. That being said, I put the first on on some cribbing and stuck it into the engine house just for effect. From handling I did manage to break some more parts on this very delicate part. I'm going to get some flexible resin and mix it with the one I'm using to impart some impact strength to the parts.

I glued that first generator on the back end and put it on some Ross railway ties. In this view you can really see those gaps at the buttresses bases. I may have to fill them if I'm going to continue to shoot these neat interior shots.

I painted the new hoist carriage, and then wound the string (cable) around the drum. I used the DeWalt as my power turner since I could run it real slow. I just CA'd the string to the drum and started winding. I would have liked the coil to be a little more regular, but it's buried in the top of the building and is not visible. AMS… When winding was done, I thin CA'd the spool with the threads hanging vertically down. I knew which way done was since the bottom face of the drum is un-ribbed.

I threaded the line through the hook and positioned it at the height I wanted and left it long. This was more challenging than it looks since there is that sheave guard complicating things. I had to prepare the tiny mounts that were grown on the carriage base. They were concave and needed to be flat so I filled them with some Bondic and using a diamond burr to flatten them. Most of the strength is the CA'd joint with the gear box.

To set the hook height, I took the free ends and wrapped them around the traverse motor's drive shafts. I had put some eyes in this new part, but they were way too small and kind of fell apart. I put the carriage in my Panavise and hung some serious weight on the hook to tighten it all up. The hemostat wasn't enough, so I added a V-block.

When it was where I wanted it, I added glue to the sheaves and to the string wrapped around the drive shafts and then clipped the excess.

I epoxied the carriage onto the gantry. Before doing that I painted the little details on the gantry. I put the gantry into the building and took some more pics. I want to hang a generator on the hook. BTW: I think I may have found out why I'm getting such sporadic engine operation in the engine house. It's those darn filler pieces. I think there are places where they rise up higher than the center rail and cut off power at the pickup rollers. I may end up removing them altogether and unballasting the track to simulate tracks laid on concrete like you see in big train stations.

To facilitate the hanging, I finally grew a generator with the shackles. Unfortunately, they're really fine and one is cracked already. I may be able to fix that with Bondic. You can even see the eye in the "removable" shackle pin. The printer will resolve it. Whether or not the part will sustain itself is another question. I set this part reversed from how I print the others. I had them with the hollow end facing down so the uncured resin would drain out when I put them out of the Machine, but this put the supports all over the end with the bolt detail and around those delicate ribs. This time the supports were on the flat back end and under the support brackets. It was much easier to clean up.

Right now the Machine is producing some of the those machines that failed earlier and some other stuff too. I went back and looked at all those drawings again last night. This time I set SketchUp's reverse face color to lime green. All of sudden there were lime green spots all over the place. No wonder that metal band saw was falling apart when I first did it. It's one thing to learn how to run the machine. Most videos you see talk about that. It's another thing to understand about the 3D drawing requirements. It's not sufficient for the object to be a solid. All the faces must face outward. ALL OF THEM! The SU drawing doesn't care about which face is visible. If all depends which direct you push pull the object into three dimensions. It's like putting on your socks. You can pull them on right side out, or inside out. It's the same in SU. If you pull it in one direction the outside sides will be visible. If you push it the other way, the inside faces will be visible. This is especially true when pulling a circle into a cylinder. What makes it so insidious is when it's just a little ring of reversed faces that are at the hub of a handwheel. The wheel falls off since there's nothing holding it. I'll know tomorrow how successful I am.

Here's an example of what the model looks like coming directly from the SU 3D Warehouse. In color it looks terrific. But when I turn off the color and highlight the reverse faces, this is what you get and it wouldn't print worth a darn.

The surfaces in red are reversed and will be invisible to the SLT Translator.

And here's what the SLT file looks like. This is what goes to the slicing software. What the SLT doesn't see, the slicer doesn't either. In this image, the roof is missing entirely, and the shelves are just a single plane. Planes have zero thickness and therefore can't exist in the real world. The back members wouldn't print either. When I draw things from scratch I manage the face direction from the get go and don't have too much editing to fix them.

The last thing I did was get one working light completed. I revised my test rig to include the LED driver just to be safe. I tested the lights unwired, wired, and then in the fixture and finally with the base attached. All worked. They're slick! The heads are still that translucent resin so they're glowing. I hope I'm able to put enough paint on them to make them appear solid. There will be on over each overhead door, the side door and the machine shop door.

I soldered one more, but didn't get the base on. So that's 2 down and 3 to go. I also glued on all the doors. I have to fix the roofing on the machine shop. It's unwrapping.

Like I said… multi-tasking.

Myles,

Is there a problem in not curing the more delicate parts? I cured half of my signal parts without the supports and and the balance with supports and see no real difference. I still have some of the uncured supports and the thin rafts that remain flexible. The 0.040 Dia supports will flex until they reach the elastic limit. This might be of help especially during assembly. Maybr be worth experimenting with one of your small machine shop models.

So I bought an Elegoo Mars 3d Printer. I am doing my first print now. I am printing some pipe supports.

I then set this up on my FormLabs 2 3D printer see above and note the print area.  At the lowest resolution the Elegoo beat the FormLabs by an hour on this print. This is because there are more operations going on on the FormLabs for each print layer. 

However, who cares. Its the quality of print that matters.

MYLES- I printed thru the U Disk; After attaching the Elegoo USB port to my computer USB port my computer does not see the Elegoo? Is yours connected to the PC?

Alan

Try this link:  https://www.facebook.com/19642.../?type=3&theater

That's a terrific image. That was a 12 cylinder version, but a similar era. It has the outside the heads fuel distribution pipes that I've added. I don't know if I have enough head room to have the engine hanging above the engine. That's directly the result of the very large-girdered overhead crane that I chose to model. I think I'm going to draw the engine block as a bare block with open cylinders and access hatch openings. It could be neat to weather it and have it  on cribbing outside.

The Elegoo, from what I understand, only gets fed by a thumb drive plugged into the port. I haven't tried to do it directly, nor do I intend to. I also found, strangely, that the Machine didn't recognize print files that I saved on the thumb drive's root directory. When I first turned it on and put my first file on the root, it couldn't find it. I thought there was an error. Then I found the Rook on a separate subdirectory and it found it and printed it perfectly. I moved my file to that sub-directory and it found mine too. I've got a sub-directory called "3D Prints" on both thumb drives I'm using and have no trouble with the Machine finding them.

Did some errands today so didn't do much, but what I did do seems to have found the limits on tiny prints. I grew four machines: the surface grinder - Came out okay, the metal band saw - All good except that I forgot to thicken the bottom plate of the chip pan and it basically doesn't have a bottom now, an acetylene welding set - really flimsy and the wheels are falling off even after I used Bondic to reinforce, and a Lincoln Electric MIG welding setup - this print was close to ridiculous. 

Still having problems with hand wheels, but these almost worked except for the angled one. On the MIG Welder, one set of hoses actually is still there. The other was so fine that it couldn't hold itself together. Magnet wire would be better. Sometimes metal just is the better material. Even without the chip pan floor, I will use the saw as is, but correct the drawing for anyone else that wants this file. I do not recommend making the MIG welder. It's just too diminutive to be practical. I'm happy that I was able to correct most of the problems with the saw.

Then I printed some furniture. The cabinet and shelves worked fine. The work bench and shelves was almost a disaster. I had doubled the thickness of the legs and added some X-bracing, but I forgot to thicken the shelves. They came out paper thin. The first shelf barely printed at all. The legs were too flimsy. I need to make them square and add more triangulation to stiffen it all up and then it will work. Once again, things you get directly from the SketchUp 3D Warehouse don't work until you mess with them.

Right now I'm working on a floor drill press. The piece looked pretty good when I first examined it. Then I zoomed in closer and found that the knobs on the ends of the three handles were all reversed. So I fixed those. Then I looked at it bottom up and found that the drill press table was not a solid. The outer portions were solid, but the space between the bracing was unfilled. The whole table would have been a flop. I have to made the handles about 3X thicker than drawn or they won't work either. Upon even closer inspection I found that the circular area at the base of the knobs was open… no face. The knobs would have failed even though I got the faces correctly oriented. I had to zoom in very, very close to see this. The lime green from the insides of the ball caught my attention. I thought it was a reversed face, but then noticed there was no face at all and I was looking at the knob's interior.

I've said this before: 3D resin printing shifts the emphasis from crafting or making to evaluation, analysis and drawing.

Happy Labor Day Everyone! Be safe and have fun!

The fine x-bracing could be a basis for scaffolding in a future print.

My first ELegoo print was no-good as one end bent upward coming off the support pins. Apparently I needed  more support pins; However, the print clearly showed the small bolts on either side.

So I tried again with more supports but only one of the three printed. the other two printed FLAT on the tray surface. I had to clean the tray removing the pancake globs.

Ahh,  the learning curve. . . .

Alan, place them at a 45 degree angle to minimize the adhesion forces on the FEP surface. When at all possible don't print large surfaces parallel to the platen. You're asking for trouble. I had a complete failure on the welding table. I went back and really looked at the drawing and found that the original artist had fully details scale casters including foot locks. I went back and solidified them and got rid of those ridiculous details would be invisible. I then found that the frame memnbers were drawn as hollow square steel tubing. While this is correct, it meant that the printer was creating part that were hollow with a wall thickness of maybe 0.001". No wonder everything before the table wasn't there. I've revised it completely and solidified everything. Rotate them so the widest surface is being held by most of the supports.

I just set this up on the slicer. I rotated them -135 degrees. I also didn't want a lot of supports in places where they were hard to remove. It's funny, but after hardening for four minutes, those spindly legs on that first workbench print are able to hold it up. Regardless, I beefed up the whole design and made the shelves solid.

Alan,

Sounds like my first two prints, For a moment I thought you were commenting on my prints.

Gerry

Myles,

Printed a "concrete" foundation for mast mounted signals.  My prints must need some your fertilizer they only grew to approx. half size. Maybe good for "HO" scale. Didn't have that problem with my first prints they were to size but were distorted in area closest to the build plate. The foundations prints have a little distortion in that same area.

I forgot to mention. The only unit of measure that the ChiTuBox slicer works with is millimeters. It will produce funny things if the STL units are in inches. That was the cause of my very first "microscopic" lathe print. It may be why you're getting funny dimensions. Checked what came out of the machine this morning and everything printed. Haven't unloaded them yet. And even with enlarging the drill press' lever arms on the down feed 2X, they're still awfully tiny.