The wailing, and crying, and gnashing of teeth (Arsenal South Signal Bridge)

[Hiroe]

This is going to be two parts: The Before, and The After.


This is The Before part. This bridge was sourced from Steven Smith off Shapeways, and took two SIX months to get because shapeways is a bunch of jerkoffs. The signal heads are from D5 DEM Model Smiths on facebook, he prints them in-house and does his own assembly with the LEDs.

[Hiroe]

This is The After. Viewer discretion is advised.  (Wind knocked the module over during setup at the April Timonium show.)




















Good thing I ended up with a spare print of the bridge, as it was just obliterated. I wanted to try to recover the undamaged signal heads; but when the bridge got crushed, a lot of the magnet wire leads got torn and shredded, meaning that it would be necessary to start over from scratch if I wanted them to work properly.

[signalmaintainer]

Bummer. A cool model demolished, and at a bad time.

What's the deal with Shapeways?

[Hiroe]

Bummer. A cool model demolished, and at a bad time.

What's the deal with Shapeways?

Thanks!
I posted in the shapeways thread elsewhere, but I'll share it here for clarity of how much of an ordeal this was to get done in the first place:

Step one (June): Ask PRR Architect (Steven Smith) to do me up a design for the signal bridge at Woodland, where the R3 Media/West Chester line diverges from the corridor. He does, and uploads it to their site (July).
Step two: (July) order the bridge, wait for them to print and ship.
Step three: (August) Bridge fails to print properly, they cancel and refund, and kick the design back to him as a problem.
Step four: (September) He edits and resubmits, I reorder and wait some more.
Step five: (October) they cancel and refund again, and no amount of arguing with their CS people will allow me to choose "just print the thing, errors and all". They kick the design back to him. Again.
Step six: (November) He has them print the design for him as a test run, it prints just fine. They ship to him.
Step seven: (December) Shipment gets lost in the mail. They reprint and ship another one at their own cost.
Step eight: (December) He receives both, brings them both to me, gratis, in trade for a module frame to be built next summer.

[Cajonpassfan]

Oh how horribly frustrating...
Hope you'll overcome.
Otto K.

[motofavorite]

Sorry about the accident. But looking forward to seeing how you rebuild it.

[unittrain]

Showcase Minatures makes the PRR signal targets now.