Those with Shapeways experience - need your input

[sirenwerks]

I'm thinking about modeling the Canada Dry plant once located in Silver Spring Maryland, which has an Art Deco curved brick and glass block facade:



I was thinking the ultra-frost would be perfect, untreated, to represent the glass block and the printing would solve the structural issues I'm encountering with other manners of building this feature of the model.  How would I orient the critical surface to get smooth brick and block faces?  Or can I?  Sanding the brick surfaces lightly wouldn't be an issue, as they'll be painted, but the glass block surface needs to remain as transparent as possible.

[Sokramiketes]

I'm not sure you could nail this with Shapeways.

What about vacuforming the curved wall and overlaying with vinyl and styrene to build up the frames?

[3rdboxcar]

Hi

I think it would be possible, build the brick / stonework in FUD, or the cheaper detail plastic material since there is not a lot of intricate detail.

Shapeways print a material called Transparent detail which is not totally transparent but more like the glass blocks you are trying to simulate, I have used them for the windows on my Horizon cars which I do not need to be totally transparent as I paint the inside black but it gives a window like surface on the outside.

Your next question will be  - "I cannot find transparent detail on the materials sheet"  that is because it is hidden in the Detail Plastic page.
Go to the materials page, select detail plastic and it is shown in the available finishes. Sometimes Detail plastic is referred to as White Detail.

Alexander

[Lemosteam]

Some RP materials can be polished and buffed- Has anyone tried this with FUD?  If you made the glass block panels with recessed mortar joints, you could sand the "faces" of the glass block finere and finer untill you could use buffing compund and a buffing wheel on a stand grinder and polish the outer surface.  That would look really cool, especially if you left the inside surface of the glass block raw.

[sirenwerks]

I'm not sure you could nail this with Shapeways.

What about vacuforming the curved wall and overlaying with vinyl and styrene to build up the frames?

I tried modeling the curved surface using PVC pipe as the underlying structure  but to get the top of the curved wall to a reasonably realistic thinness, I wasn't getting enough structural support to hold the curve.  In part because I had not a lot of glue-able surface on the PVC to laminated the brick sheet to just above and below the glass block facade, because I had to cut a significant portion of the pipe away to be able to recess to clear styrene glass block wall I had scribed far enough forward.

The drawings and more photos of this building are available on the HABS site - http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/md1587/.  The photo I posted doesn't quite show it but the third and fourth floor brick structure are significantly recessed from the first and second.  And the top two floors have much tighter brick curves on all four corners of that structure.  Another hope of mine was to at least minimally feature the interior entrance.  The curve of the lower floor facade continues into the interior to create a tube, basically, and behind the glass block wall and front doors is a a grand circular staircase leading up to the office area.  That would look very cool lit up.

I envisioned printing it all out (in parts) just like the building was constructed, brick level by brick level