Decline of non-etched details

[Erik W]

I was looking through the detail parts section of my trusty 2007 Walthers catalog last night, specifically the Sunrise Enterprises page.  While we are progressing as a scale on many fronts we seem to be heading in the wrong direction as far as 3 dimensional (non photo-etched) locomotive and rolling stock detail parts.  Actually, this holds true for the availability of detail parts in general.  These items seem to be more a labor of love than a money maker, as I'm sure Craig at BLMA has figured out as he branches into rolling stock.  I'm not sure where we go from here.  Do you think anyone will fill the void left by Sunrise or Detail Associates? 

Erik

[wm3798]

One possibility is an advance in styrene castings.  When the rolling stock manufacturers continue to add details to their RTR stuff, that means there's a sprue of details out there being made.  If that includes things like train line hoses, ladders and grabs etc. etc., wouldn't it make sense for the mfr to start selling those in a separate package?

Atlas locomotive parts are getting better and better, including a variety of horn configurations, a couple different plows, bells and other goodies.  Add the parts made by or for Intermountain, Kato, ESM, Bluford etc.

And with styrene, the detail is often better and finer than can be achieved with white metal.  It can also be easier to work with, although maybe not as sturdy.  But still, I think there's an opportunity to  get some of the major components this way...  The oddball road specific stuff will still be a challenge, though.

Lee

[Philip H]

I wonder i fthis is an area where rapid prototyping technology could help out.  I know many of the machines can't cut their resin to too fine a scale, but if you need, say, a weird 7 chime horn, the rapid prototype machine could cut it for you and then you just do a little sanding and mount, paint, and run.  Done right, and in a small enough package, I could see one of these in a LHS, wher eyou pick your part and scale from a digital list, and then presto, you get your thingy cut right before your eyes.

Dang - I should have patented and trade amrked that idea first, shouldn't I?

[Erik W]

One possibility is an advance in styrene castings.  When the rolling stock manufacturers continue to add details to their RTR stuff, that means there's a sprue of details out there being made.  If that includes things like train line hoses, ladders and grabs etc. etc., wouldn't it make sense for the mfr to start selling those in a separate package?

Atlas locomotive parts are getting better and better, including a variety of horn configurations, a couple different plows, bells and other goodies.  Add the parts made by or for Intermountain, Kato, ESM, Bluford etc.

And with styrene, the detail is often better and finer than can be achieved with white metal.  It can also be easier to work with, although maybe not as sturdy.  But still, I think there's an opportunity to  get some of the major components this way...  The oddball road specific stuff will still be a challenge, though.

Lee

Having seen the injection molded details on the Life-Like Berk and 2-8-8-2 when they first came out, I realized fine injection molding had come of age.  I know it wouldn't be very cost effective and profitable, but you could get almost all the type of locomotive details offered by Sunrise in one mold the size of IMRC's parts molds.  Meaning, your multitude of detail parts could all come from one mold then.  Of course, I know first hand the cost of creating the tooling for something like this.  It would be interesting to see if a manufacturer took this approach what the final cost of the parts would have to be to turn a profit.  Would we, as consumers, be willing to pay $6 - $8 for a small needed part that previously cost $3 - $4?

Erik

[ljudice]

Is this where RP could play a role?

You order part from a website, and a batch of 10-20 unrelated small parts are printed at once and then shipped out.  The cost of RP is time and materials and the material cost would be low... ???

Of course you would need one of the finer RP systems to do an acceptable job.

Or am I off base here?

[Mark5]

AFAIK the RP machines are slow moving beasts, so quantities can't be large. I could be wrong about that ...

[DKS]

Is this where RP could play a role?

You order part from a website, and a batch of 10-20 unrelated small parts are printed at once and then shipped out.  The cost of RP is time and materials and the material cost would be low... ???

Of course you would need one of the finer RP systems to do an acceptable job.

Or am I off base here?

MakeMyModel tried that, and they're kaput.

AFAIK the RP machines are slow moving beasts, so quantities can't be large. I could be wrong about that ...

That, and the resolution still sucks for all but the ultra-high-end models.

[Mark4]

Is this where RP could play a role?

 The cost of RP is time and materials ...

and the research and the 3D modelling and the machine consumables and the post-build support removal and cleaning and the yield issues plus packaging and arranging shipping...

[Mark4]

That, and the resolution still sucks for all but the ultra-high-end models.

 So...your definition of an "ultra-high-end model" is one with a resolution that "doesn't suck"?

[u18b]

That must mean Mark 4 shells are Ultra high end -- and sell for around $29.

Hmmmm.  Not bad. 

I hope to be getting some soon so I'm saving my pennies (I've got about 4 Mark 4 projects in mind).

(and still begging for a GP15T in N scale)

[DKS]

That, and the resolution still sucks for all but the ultra-high-end models.

 So...your definition of an "ultra-high-end model" is one with a resolution that "doesn't suck"?

Basically. I don't have the specs, obviously. I have quite a few samples of RP products. I have a number of your products, and they are outstanding. But unfortunately quite a bit of the rest out there is junk.

It's as much a matter of skill as as it is the specs, if not more so. Those designers who understand the limitations of RP and work with them will outshine those who have been deluded into thinking they can "do anything" with RP. The low-res units are indeed capable of producing usable products assuming the designer fully appreciates these limitations, and chooses items to produce that suit the medium. For example, the low-end units are fine for making items such as bridge abutments. But things like freight cars? Forget it; that's a realm reserved for the very high-end units, and the designers that can get the most out of them.

Now, given the subject of detail parts, we're narrowing things down even further. The low-end units would be limited to relay boxes, maybe; they have no hope of tackling anything with the delicacy of horns, for example, or even snow plows, which has long, sloping angles that turn into staircases on lower-end units.

Sorry if I compressed paragraphs of concepts into a few words, but IMO that about sums it up.

[ljudice]

I would assume the research and design part is the same for any approach, so I didn't bother mentioning it...

And shipping is the same...

And inventory is less or zero...

Again the idea is that say 12 orders for different things come in from different people - 12 completely different items are printed simultaneously and then shipped out.  Or am I mis-understanding the capability of these machines? Can they make two different things in one run?

I mean there has to be a point at which you can make high quality parts at the lowest practical cost in the fastest possible turnaround time, right?  It may not be cheap - it may not be fast - but it might be better than any other solution.

Sorry for the naive approach here - I spent many years in microelectronics cad software development, specifically around optical and electron beam lithography, so I am probably totally misunderstanding something here...

[Mark5]

I hate to throw this out but maybe there isn't a market for details.

I see photos of "super detailed" locos that people "oooh" and "ah" about but they have the wrong horns, are missing bells etc.

Could it be that the overwhelming majority of N scalers don't care?

To put this in perspective I don't consider myself obsessive about details by any measure, but I would like some basic stuff to be correct (like horns!).

In HO you have horns available from Details West, Detail Associates, and CalScale.

http://www.detailswest.com  :

After nearly 40 years in N scale it's still slim pickings for many "basic" detail parts.

Mark

[DKS]

I would assume the research and design part is the same for any approach, so I didn't bother mentioning it...

And shipping is the same...

And inventory is less or zero...

Again the idea is that say 12 orders for different things come in from different people - 12 completely different items are printed simultaneously and then shipped out.  Or am I mis-understanding the capability of these machines? Can they make two different things in one run?

I mean there has to be a point at which you can make high quality parts at the lowest practical cost in the fastest possible turnaround time, right?  It may not be cheap - it may not be fast - but it might be better than any other solution.

Sorry for the naive approach here - I spent many years in microelectronics cad software development, specifically around optical and electron beam lithography, so I am probably totally misunderstanding something here...

For RP, you've got all of the design work, which would be equivalent to making a master for a conventional process. You won't have an inventory per se as you would after ordering up a minimum number of castings, as an example, but production time is not trivial, plus there's a lot of clean-up for each part. The machine could presumably make several different parts all at once, but this may or may not be of any advantage. In the end, I don't think RP provides a whole lot in the way of business process savings over conventional methods.

However, one major advantage it does provide is in the realm of part design: you can have undercuts and complex shapes that would be impossible to reproduce using any conventional casting method, so it can create some really unique parts. Another advantage is that you can make something that would ordinarily be done using injection-molding, but without cutting any steel; thus, you don't need to sell ten thousand units to recover tooling costs. But it won't save you scads of time overall, because it's not simply a push-a-button-and-make-a-dozen system. And mass-producing ten thousand units is pretty much out of the question.

[wcfn100]

I think you guys are missing a lot in the setup.

Do you think you could just combine 12 unrelated cad drawings and tell a CnC operator to push start ?


Jason