¡Hola! The 3-Foot 6 DM Class - 3

DB perambules onwards in Spanish:

Glazing.... This was really hard. The easy bit was painting some clear styrene with Tamiya Smoke. 

The DM has two cabs of course. One of mine is at the, well lets call it the 'good end' which will have a driver and lead the trains, and the other is the crappy end, which will face the wagons. The bad end has a lovely coupler and a broken 3d-printed cab handrail that I knocked off somehow during the current commissioning process. The good end has all its handgrabs intact and a recycled coupler that is a bit gummed with glue, but as it is in the lead, it won't be used much anyway.

I glazed up the bad end first.

The side windows were cut to shape and some Microscale Kristal Klear (kringeworthy naming aside) which was dabbed on the inside, using whatever tiny holes remained available to prod a stick with a small blob of it around the inside. Tweezers then forced the glazing up into the inside through the little hole under the cab and attempted to place it in the right location without smearing too much Kristal Klear about on the visible glass face. Not an easy task.

The front piece was cut to the approximate size and shape by trial and error (not an easy task for my eyes against the black painted window frame background (so it might be easier to do this while the shell is still grey). This was also attached with Kristal Klear and a skinny black strip of styrene added between the two panes afterwards. I'll probably go over the edges of the glass in black later, although that might also be a recipe for disaster.

You may not be able to see it here, but before the glass went in, I painted the drivers desk (this had to be done via the side windows) and I also made up a little angled box for the console that sits to the driver's left.

An issue with glazing the DM is that the actual 'glass' in the real thing is a lot smaller than the black painted bits, especially with the tiny side windows and the front emergency exit window. I've brightened up the shadows in a picture of the real thing to show this:

Anyway. As for the good end. The sides were installed per the above process but the front left open at this stage. Lewis has hinted that a better and far cleverer glazing solution might be on the way.

A volunteer was then called from a box of 1:120 unpainted figures that date from my TranzAlpine AG van exploits, and painted up with the current KiwiRail 'uniform' of an orange fleece/jacket with white reflectorised stripes, and a black golf shirt underneath. 

Unfortunately our man had to meet with an unfortunate accident (link nsfw) to fit behind the desk with his arms sitting above it, but the less said about that the better. Because of the tight spaces inside, to add salt to the literal wound, he then had contact glue smeared on his lower torso and hands in an undignified manner before being ruthlessly forced through the front window at the end of a pair of tweezers.

The printed long hood sides have also been laid on with some sort of tacky white glue. One of the yellow bits bothered me enough (a bit too fluro/green) that I overlaid it with the cab paint. I think this is the side visible in all three pics below.  

The cabside numbers came from some N Scale Microscale BNSF decal sheets and the white reflector strips are from a Southern Pacific set, cut into chunks. I've not put these along the sides in the hope that a set of handrails will mysteriously appear in my mailbox in a month's time. Until then, this project will go into stasis.

¡Hola! The 3-Foot 6 DM Class - 2

DB continúa...

The ugly close-ups department has heartlessly captured the following unpleasant pictures. You have to remember that even with my magnifying loupe, I'm basically poking around with the paintbrush by feel here and even with it on I still can't see this mess of the now-grey headstock details. 

More painting, and some couplers after they were added in the greatly-expanded coupler boxes:

Mounting... My old SD90MAC was retrieved. This is a loco that I've never really liked (although I do like the weathering effort on the top). It needed some pruning with the pair of cast metal ears filed down (circled in red)

The DM top had to have the four underskirts removed, plus I needed to remove two of the little 45-degree brace/angles right up inside the shell to make room for the taller end of the metal chassis :

And it then sits reasonably low with its couplers at the right height, again with my over-magentaed first-pass paper sides 'placed' on the body for an approximation of looks:

You'll see in the first (prototype) pic from the previous post that the real loco is a real low-rider, but getting the model lower without majorly messy surgery to thin the inside of the roof and side sills would be really tough. 

Additional under-details - pyramoidal sandboxes and an effort to 'lower' the toolboxes were added from white styrene below:

I'm a bit disappointed in how what started out as nice airbrushing job has turned into a bit of a blobby mess, but its unlikely many people will see it from this close anyway. 

I must also say that the pictures presented in the last two issues (#18 and #19) of The Linesider, that fine organ of Aotearoan ferro-equiology, have been invaluable in making progress so far.

Off shopping

Last week, Darryl was in Welliington being a magazine magnate and so we arranged to meet up.

To make things easy from both directions we picked Waikanae on Friday for lunch. After a nice meal at Paraparaumu beach (during which I got part of my Linesider subscription back), we then went to look at the 2(!) local hobby shops. 

First up is Kapiti Hobbies, located 1 block back from the esplanard in the local pharmacy. The owner is a wargamer and so the models are geared towards that. An excellent selection of paints and weathering bits from a variety of manufacturers. Mr Bond was like a kid in a candy shop. "Ohhhh, they have that ... Oh and I've always wanted to try this...Ohh this looks neat too...And plastic...". In fact, its exactly how he is in a candy shop (or bakery).

The second, which I was only made aware of 2 hours previously is Mini-Kiwiland. This was a real eye-opener for me. a wide selection of models, paints and bits and scenery. and the postage is cheap too. I purchase a few

So how does "Gods waiting room" get 2 good hobby shops within 5km of each other, while Palmy gets 1, and Wellington gets none? In any case, Darryl made a sizable contribution to the local economy.

And a building update, I've added some driveways and paths to my railway houses.

Fremo

DB notes:

Michael Tolich posted a few pics today from last weekend's Fremo (US HO) meet at Huntly and he has allowed me to post them here.

Pretty impressive for just 15 modellers being present!

They have a big meet each year in Morrinsville that attracts over 100 modules. 

This is what NZ120 should be aiming for...!

¡Hola! The 3-Foot 6 DM Class - 1

DB puedo hablar un poco de español:

Despite having one of these prints on my bench for some months now, it seems I'm going to struggle to get it into service before the real thing. 

Initial thoughts on the print: 

It looks waaaay overscale when placed next to my model DXCs - too tall and too long. It seems it's not, the real thing being a lot bigger than we are used to! 

Great detail - the difficult cabs and front end are well represented, even the front handrails are there. The roof details are pretty good too, although some are quite subtle and may vanish under a coat of paint. 

Further investigation:

After the real DMs arrived here and were seen in the flesh, it appeared like they would be a very challenging prototype to model. The sides are very detailed, and the prominent black rubber joins between the door panels will be really hard to paint and imagine applying the decals around these. 

There are also differences between the shell and prototype in the side door panels, especially those close to the cab, and on one side of the loco (the 'upside down' side in the image below) which has the square dynamic brake inlets. Not that many people would notice any of this. 

So I decided straight away that my sides would be photo overlays printed onto glossy paper, a la Ken Devlin Specials.  I spent about three hours one night building up the sides from photographs. This required perspective correction, scaling, colour matching, and - for the other 2.9 hours - removing the complex side handrails from the photos.

If anyone wants this full size (about 4000x4000 pixels) you can email me at the LinesiderNZ email. Maybe Lewis might host it on his website as this will get compressed. 

I took the file down to the print shop, printing it on the same paper The Linesider uses. The first page looked too magenta, so a little green was added, and by the third copy it looked about right. Even if you take the same file to three proper commercial printers, you will likely get three subtly different hues depending on what paper, ink and model of printer is being used, and the temperature, humidity and even whether the printer is warmed up or not will affect tones, which are basically dependant on how the different colours of ink (cyan, magenta, yellow and black, or sometimes red, green, blue) are absorbed into, and layer up on, the paper. The things I've learned over the past few years.

With this done and laid over the top, it made obvious a few shell issues which will likely be corrected in a future iteration of the 3D model. Primarily that the radiator section (roof fans and 'union jack' sides) is a bit close to the cab at that end. This also pulls the adjoining chunky roof section over the engine/SCR unit  (with its four 'feet') a bit further off-centre. 

On the side sills, the circular lifting lug holes are also slightly misplaced. This is what made me initially wonder whether the shell was overscale, because the bogie centre spacing was one of the few prototype measurements I had when the shell arrived. I'm not sure I will remember to move them...

The panel-side details aren't going to be a problem, as I'm going to be using my paper overlays anyway, but I will need to move the roof fans to sit over my union jacks, and this will require moving the engine room roof as well. I'm also tempted to make the roof a/c units more prominent, which will make them easier to paint.

Into Surgery:

The first thing I decided to tackle was to slightly alter the cab roof top corners. These are angled (as modelled on the shell) at the 'back' corners to give plenty of door height access into the cab, but at the front, the real thing transitions to a more rounded shape. A little filing sorted this.

When viewed from above, the front face of the cab should also curve a little more at the corners, rather than having a bevelled join. I had a little crack at this, but not in the top-right corners (when viewed from the front) where there are a nice handrails printed. 

The 'cowcatchers' were also subtly modified at the bottom. There's not much to fault though, as the very complex cabs have been modelled well.

After the pic above was taken, I also opened out the bottom of the coupler pocket to take MicroTrains couplers - another message to designers - every 3D printed coupler box I've ever seen has needed to be enlarged.

The roof fans and engine lid were moved about 5mm towards the middle (I was also able to move my sides slightly the other way to meet them!).

So in summary, you could well say none of this surgery really made that much difference. 

And below, with filler added, ready for painting. 

First few coats badly sprayed:

LC wrap up

 DB finishes up:

A bit of paint, weathering, coal and decalling has this batch of LCs (10 of Lewis H's latest model and two of the older prints) added to the coal train. My homemade black-on-white laser printed 'Lyttelton coal traffic' decals somtimes exhibit a little cracking at the edges if they are cut out with a less-sharp knife, and then some white shows through, so most of that was touched up with some flat black paint.

One of the neat features of the latest iteration of the 3-Foot-6 LC is that, because it is downscaled from an Sn3.5 model, it has a lot of really nice fine detail in the doors, end handgrabs, and a footstep at one end. Picking the last two items out in white really makes the wagons look nicely detailed. I need to add a few handbrake levers at some stage. Something that might be a good thing to etch.  

Recent efforts with the Trackgang whitemetal kits and 3-Foot-6 3D-printed ones have eradicated my early 1990s bog-cast resin ones from service, leaving me with a pretty good looking decent-length classic 1980s Midland Line coal train. When you add locos, guards van and the little protective XP or KP in front of it, it is about 2.1m long, or as long as the Studholme loops will take. 

The train looks pretty good. Hardly finescale, but its uber-Bondscale quality. 

I'll probably add another 5-10 of Lewis' next version, as I'd like to have the option of having an even longer train, plus having a few extras to drop into normal goods trains. And it sounds like a few LAs might be on the cards too. 

In summary, with no naked-eye visible strata, these latest LCs take the 'Nicest 3D Print That I Have' title away from the ZAs, and with the addition of new floor mounting points and some interior door lines, they will be just perfect. As Lewis says "the beauty of this tech is we can constantly and fairly easily iterate our designs to improve them"

And all credit to him for not only making these models available to the NZ120 community (filling the void left by the demise of Shapeways) but continuing to improve them; and to the earlier pioneers of 3D printing whose designwork have enabled this. And in the days before 3D, lets not forget Russell Jones' Trackgang (and Pat Eade's earlier Trackside) - all of this had made NZ120 a more viable scale. Three cheers for the suppliers!

I ain't dead yet

 Well, after quite a few months of radio silence, I'm back. And while NZ120 has not figured largely in my modeling over the last 8 months, I thought it was time to take stock of where things are.

The last time I looked at my railway houses I had painted them and it seemed like it was full steam ahead. we then arrived at paralysis by analysis. I wanted to create a separate base to move the buildinsg off the layout to work on them. I got stuck on what the sub base should be. MDF is all well and good but what if it starts warping? Can I find something rigid enough? 

And there it sat untill last week when I had a bit of an epifany that I didn't need to do it on 1 large piece, I could do it at 1 base per house section. This would minimise the warpage over a shorter length.

Looking at my shots from Retrolens I calculated some rough measurements based on the size of the NZR houses. Unlike other authors who have the luxury of freescaling their buildings, the bog standard railway house is a fixed size and square and so I'm stuck with them dimension wise.

I had a stash of 2mm MDF, liberated from my previous employer when I was made redundant last year, which was about the right depth and I could get 2 sections from 1 piece of MDF. As good a reason as any. I painted both sides green as a base coat and as everybody should know, painting both sides of MDF sheet "stops" warping mostly. I then mapped out the house locations on each section and glued them down.

The only issue is that the backyards are not long enough. It can't be helped, move on.

Oh, and in other news, after 8 months I have a job. It's in Palmy and still in scince, just a sideways shuffle to a production role with a startup.

Are we there yet? Taking Stock of 3d Printing with some LCs

DB completes the 3D printing review with what was to be the opener in the post...

I've had quite a few purchases from the Lewis Holden Printing Factory on my workbench for a while. Some for well over than a year now. So lets look at a few frustrations from 3D printing (this has since been started in previous posts on passenger cars). 

Some of these models are LC tops. These are the same as ones I've bought and posted about previously, but putting them up against the latest additions to the four-wheeled coal train, the Trackgang whitemetal LCs (the brown completed one below) shows a contrast when it comes to the details like the placement and 'finery' of the ribs and internal tie-down 'bumps', and also the overall straightness and squareness that 3D Printing was supposed to help us with, although I suppose in this case, bent bodies were pretty realistic for coal route LCs!

But also note the chunkiness of the ribs and wall thickness of this particular design (and my earlier KS wagons).

My Z scale exploits have made me pay more attention to wagons 'riding high', and in recent projects you may have noticed me sanding down bogie mounting points and inserting the Peco chassis 'up into the body' for the recent batches of LCs. To my eye, this presents a far more accurate portrayal of the LC than when the top is sitting way up high on top of the chassis.

Modelling that lower look with these printed models (or making any alterations at all) is more of a pain than with scratchbuilt stuff, because the resin is so tough and brittle, so to 'raise the floor' you really have to get in there with a dremel, which is challenging to get into tight corners, and messy.

To make a proper low-rider, I need to remove the above areas painted black with a Sharpie pen, to let me insert the chassis. 

In fact even without my low-rider desire, I'd still need to either thin the Peco's plastic chassis or remove a smaller amount of resin print because those walls are so thick the Peco won't fit between them as intended anyway.

And ideally, for looks, you want to thin the inner side walls a little when viewed from the top. Further surgery had to be performed on the Pecos (see in the pic below) to make up for not being able to get a dremel deep into the corners of the underside....

The end result is nice:

In the pic below, compare the low slung LC (light brown one at right) with the sit-on-top Euro-look LC (darker model at left) in the below pic:

But getting to this point is too much work for a 3D print. I could have scratchbuilt this from styrene in half the time I spent dremelling. Why not just modify the design to save everyone the hassle? 

And that is exactly what Lewis has done with his latest creation, after some back and forth with Dandruff HQ.

This is his build in the pic above, looking pretty sweet. This is a great example of "if you're going to go to the effort of designing it, why not make it as good as you can?"

So, a number were acquired, but they have been sitting on my bench for a while as they required some pondering time. The outsides look superb:

That's some mighty tasty and fine detail. Note the handgrab and footstep on the end (the little knobs on top are from supports used in the 3d printing and curing process and are easily removed with a file.

The floor is supplied as a separate piece:

The challenge is fitting it... The tops have a little protrusion that is probably supposed to locate the floor, but mine were only on three of the inner sides. It was a very tight and tricky fit for the floor. Plus they are inclined to be a little warpy by their flat nature, so after many attempts I decided there was no way I was going to get flat or consistently located floors without assistance. 

After fiddling with various sizes of plasticard rod, I reckon 0.060 inches-worth of Evergreen styrene is the right depth of stopper to have the floor sit at the height I want.  So strips of .040x.060 were cut and levelled with the bottom of the side walls thus:

I quickly found it easiest to do it the way pictured below, holding the wagon down and simultaneously pressing the strip against a knife blade (or a ruler or something) held in the other hand for a few seconds while the superglue took:

Then it was time to create some NZ120 marching powder by thinning one side and one end of the floor:

So the floor drops in nicely against the stoppers. If it warps up in the middle that's no drama, because the chassis will be secured at the corners anyway:

From here it was paint time: various shades of reddy brown on top:

And some drybrushed brown on the bottoms as the wagon assembly plant rolled into action:

Ta-da:

About 15 years ago, I had three holy grails for NZ120. 

1. A module standard.
2. A realistic one-piece modern freight bogie.
3. And a relatively cheap LC and KP top that you could just pop onto a Peco - meaning anyone could churn out trains quickly without needing any special tools or skills.   

It looks we are getting very close to being 2/3rds of the way there.

More 3D moaning with Wooden Carriages, but it all works out in the end.

DB rails on from a post that was going to be yesterday's which will probably appear out of order in the next day or three, but since I've started on these carriages:

My next frustration with 3d prints is strata. When I dipped back into NZ120 about 15 months ago, I bought a set of 3D printed wooden carriages:

I didn't realise they were this bad until I had primed, painted, dulcoated, and then started washing them with some weathering. They certainly don't look great with a light shining off them that's for sure. Had I noticed this earlier I'd have sanded them down a bit. Which I did with the roofs, as there is a pronounced 'ridge' along the roof centreline and on the rounded ends. Fairly easily dealt with using a long thin fine file for the centre ridge (so as not to knock the roof ventilators which are nicely done, and fine sandpaper for the roof ends to give them a smoother-flowing shape where the curves join.    

These are fairly old prints now I guess, and new ones from higher resolution printers will be smoother... but having said that, I've paid for them, and there is now a much better one available. A bit like every camera and computer I've ever bought I suppose. 

My next grumble is is warping. It seems most 3D printed things that are shaped like a bathtub will warp - wagon sides and locomotives bow out like the below, and often they have a minor 'humpbacked' longitudinal bend. 

While most prints seem to have relatively fine supports inside in an attempt to counter this during printing and curing, they tend to snap and break off due to the warping forces. So why not make them stronger and more numerous? These carriages have this feature already, with some good thick cross pieces under the crown posts that tie the sides together. If there were two more located here (red arrows) the whole side would be nice and straight, and the truss rods wouldn't splay out and then pull apart: 

These structural tie-pieces would be welcome on my ZAs, and even the Wb loco (as the user can remove them many months later when applying a chassis - I note the DM print has these, which is sensible).

And my last frustration with the 3D printed stuff, and then I promise I'll zip-it (other than tomorrow's post), is the sagging of fine detail. This sometimes manifests itself in hanging edges becoming curved or scolloped (compare the scalloped underframe of the car-van in the foreground vs the ruler-straight sides of the car because I have overlaid its bendy bits with styrene, although this pushes them out closer to the red 'wooden' sides than I'd like:

Fine unsupported rodding often sags too, such as on these Shapeways Z tanktainers:

Presumably this is from a lack of supports, or maybe it happens during curing. 

So you have to cut off the offending bits, and then due to the material's brittleness, even more bits snap off. Maybe its time to accept that 3D isn't yet ready for this type of fine detail yet and it could be omitted, with slots or holes left instead so that we can put these details in ourselves using straight plastic or brass rod. 

I used .030x.030 plastic square rod to replace the broken and bent truss rods to match the existing printed rodding, but in hindsight, looking at some prototype pics afterwards,  I should have used much thinner brass rod and done all six carriage sides.

Enough moaning. These carriage bodies look ok from 2-3 feet away. Arguably the finescale MMW ends and bogies make everything else - carriage bodies, couplers, track, buildings, other rolling stock, ballast and scenery, look horribly chunky.

Bogie screws and couplers are yet to be figured out. I added battery boxes to one of the cars and immediately took them off because they looked silly. Now after dredging up some prototype pics, I wasn't actually that far off so will re-add them. I also need to do something about glazing the guards ducket. Or replacing it with the modern pressed steel pattern.

-----The next day:

I pulled out some Microtrains and Peco couplers to fit the cars with, but with the bogies having cross pieces at the ends that I didn't want to fiddle with, couplers would have to stick out a long way to clear these.

So I started playing with the 'sprue' of the MMW parts, cutting an L out of the corner and putting a slot in the end of it. This was three small holes joined up with the help of a knife and some files. 

And this made up a simple hook-and-eye arrangement:

Note also the white .040x040 rod bearers added to the bolsters of the cars to encourage upright running in the above pic. These were added at one end of each carriage.

In testing, the cars negotiate the tight curve behind the roundhouse and the 'S curves' of the pointwork at Studholme whether pushed or pulled. Those are large radius turnouts, so perhaps they would struggle on medium radius crossovers, but I'll leave that for some future experimentation. 

There is also a tiny bit of play in the bogie mounts too which can't hurt. After wondering how I was going to attach the bogies, I ended up using small flat-headed nails that are about an inch long - the points of which have been liberally contact-glued to the underside of the carriage roofs! Seems to work...

The below was a first cut at carriage steps - a plastic one glued to the underframe, and bits of MMW steps attached to the corners of the bogies.

These didn't last long and were replaced with folded up MMW ones attached to the frame, shortened and mounted a fair way outboard to clear the swing of the bogies on curves.

A little weight was added underneath using nails. Keepin' it classy, NZ120. Bogies have been mounted, and steps are in place.

As afterthoughts, I 'painted' a loo in using some white styrene behind the windows, added the centre (ventilator?) (top-middle of that red sides) which might also be loo-related, and steps under the baggage door on the van. I should have done the rain strip on the roof above the baggage doors, but that would have upset the weathering that I'm pretty happy with.

Battery boxes were re-added - these had to be very thin styrene because the truss rods are so far outboard. Painting everything 'weathered black' helps disguise the inaccuracies.

And as a final touch, the circular number and class plates were also carefully painted weathered black. These are quite prominent on most of the pictures I've seen, so I painted little yellow 2s to signify second class. This was done with yellow that had a touch of dark included. Then to further lower the contrast, a blob of Tamiya 'smoke' was placed on top. Another blob may yet be applied...

You can see how far the Microtrains couplers had to stick out on the ends to clear the bogie frames, but my homemade couplers give a really nice 'close coupling' effect between the cars.

I don't know much about carriages, but I assume these are 47-6 ones. Not even sure if they operated on the Coast or on the Waimate Branch, but most importantly, they are red, so will look the part behind a DJ or a tank engine or at the end of a mixed train. When viewed from the rigorously-enforced mandatory minimal viewing distances.