Coal Car Test Truck

I refined the truck design a little over the holidays, and assembled a couple of test prints. The mechanical aspects are fairly good now, and as you can see it equalizes quite nicely. I just have to improve the supports a little so I don’t lose any more brake beams!

Coal Car Trucks

I’m taking a little break from Percy as I wait for some slightly larger, more powerful motors that I ordered earlier this week. I cast about for another project to pick up for a week or two and alighted on the coal cars. They’ve been waiting for a resolution to the weight problem, and they […]

Percy’s New Parts

The parts rolled off the 3D printers over the course of the day today. The gearbox halves took all of 22 minutes on the FDM printer, while the resin printer poked along at all the bits that need to look good for over six hours. I’m happy and a little surprised to report that all […]

Percy TEsts the Fit

3D models are all very well and good, but there are practical aspects to fitting a gear train inside an existing model. In particular, Percy received a bunch of weight in the boiler and saddle tanks. Who knows if the theoretical drive will actually fit? In about 20 minutes, the filament printer made rough approximations […]

Coal Car Test Print

From 3D file to the first print always makes me feel like a ten-year-old on Christmas morning. A ten-year-old with a ventilator, gloves and safety glasses in a basement workshop that smells more of chemicals than of pine. With this being the first whole car I’ve attempted to print, I hardly expected it to work […]

Painting Wood Loads

I had three flat car loads to experiment upon, and with time running short before the Railway Modellers’ Meet, I got right to work. I had picked up a Vallejo paint pack for wood and leather when I went to Burnaby Hobbies for some primer. The “Dark Sand” in the pack seemed a good starting […]

Lumber Load Trials

The flat cars, despite being scratch built the old-fashioned way, were jig-built so that the loads can be swapped. The trick is to confidently locate the stake pockets in a 3D model to locate the stakes themselves. I started by measuring, and then printed a couple of test loads on the FDM printer. Its resolution […]

Replacing a Quadrant

Throwing the engine lead switch, there was an unusual “thunk” and then the lever moved a little too easily. Reaching underneath, I felt a new sharp edge rotating behind the fascia. A couple of the levers have needed replacement, but this was the first quadrant that broke. Fortunately I still have the drawing. The new […]

FeatureScript Changes the Game

Speaking of flat cars, what about their loads? Most of the time, these cars would have carried lumber or logs. Without a sawmill on the line, it is unlikely they carried logs in my town, but there is a photo of a flat car of lumber in Pembroke. I’d always imagined I would create lumber […]

Three at Once

If you’ve got a third machine that can make stuff, you really need to get all three machines working at once. So, on New Year’s Day, I revved up the two 3D printers, printing parts for the upcoming steam throttle project. While they were happily layering away, I fired up the laser cutter to make […]