Erie Canal Branch Mini Layout N scale

[Mark5]

You may notice a theme going on here... I 3D printed new windows for the Vulcan building. The kit window muntin's in grey were .042" thick and my new ones in black are .017" thin.

Sweet! 

[JeffB]

23 degrees it is then!

Going to give that a try as soon as I get around to printing something again.

Jeff

[GaryHinshaw]

That looks great Chris! 

RE the print orientation: the idea is to minimize the effects of stair-casing in the prints.   For example, in the Photon Mono, the x,y pixel size is .051 mm (51 μm), so if you set your layer height to be the same .051 mm, then the x,y,z dimensions of a voxel are all the same.  Then if you print a flat surface at 45 degrees, your print will go one layer up for every pixel over and the stair-casing will be barely noticeable.  However, if you leave the layer height at the default .050 mm,  and print at 45 degrees, then you go 51 layers up for every 50 layers over and the stair-casing looks ghastly.  (You could also print at 22.5 degrees for a 2:1 staircase ratio.)

I'm not sure where 46.62 comes from, but it must have been for a printer with a z/(x,y) ratio of 1.058.

[Chris333]

This was the chart I used, but just threw it out and cut it in half.


It helps when you have a curved locomotive boiler, to keep it from stair stepping. The Sonic Mini 4K has 35 micron pixels    The OG Photon was 47 micron, pretty sure the chart is based on that.

[GaryHinshaw]

Yep, .05/.04725 = 1.058.

By the way, one advantage to printing at 45 degrees with z=(x,y) is that when you have a cubic type object, both the +45 and -45 degree sides print with the same quality.  You probably knew that already though. 

[narrowminded]

This principle is so obvious yet it never occurred to me.  Thanks for these posts.   

[PJPickard]

Same here, good info, thanks.

[Chris333]

Seems like it's going slow, but I've been working on the roads.

Got the Vulcan building painted.

My new windows on the right.


This little nook will be a junkyard with a fence in red. The track right of teh fence is the "mainline".

I made the little block junkyard office:


Incidentally I found this building from part of a Bar Mills kit and even used screen shots of their video to draw it.

/>Turns out it is based on a Shorpy photo https://www.shorpy.com/node/25809 The building is gone now https://www.google.com/maps/@41.2524097,-95.9456066,3a,60y,90t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1snjjLMKxTnTZbZFzGM_LnfQ!2e0!7i16384!8i8192
I made mine different and had to shorten it to fit the layout.

Not much changed here:

And I whipped up this small office for my coal dealer:

[Chris333]

Oh and here is some of the 3D crap.

Road drain grates https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5176792
Building front  https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5176754
Junkyard office  https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5176753
Coal dealer office  https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5176752

I'll upload more later.

[MK]

Very nice!  What's the radius of the track in front of the junk yard office?  Looks kind of sharp.

[Chris333]

Very nice!  What's the radius of the track in front of the junk yard office?  Looks kind of sharp.

140mm so 5.5" radius. Yeah it's tight. Whole layout is only 16" wide.

[dem34]

Won't have a pic until I assembly it but wow  . That Garage turns out snazzy when I printed it with my FDM.

*Temped up, these are some nice buildings. Excuse the "Composition Placeholders"

[Chris333]

Sweet!    Did the front wall pop off the side or it there something wrong with the files?

[dem34]

nah, Sliced the building up into faces so I could use ironing on the exterior. Each face is printed flat and once completed the extruder head runs over the layer lines to fill in the ridges and take off the high spots, but usually leaves little dimples that need to be cleaned up.

Overall slower than Resin printing since it needs to be pruned and assembled and with a bit worse final quality, but its nice to not have to deal with photo resin. I keep having a a back and forth in my head on whether to keep my Photon Mono just dealing with the stuff in my limited workspace.

[Chris333]

Some color since the last pic.