I am pretty new here but as some of you may have noticed I am heavily into 3D printing. I am a poor scratchbuilder but 3D printing seems to go ok. I'll show you my latest project to share what I am learning from it.
Some time ago I decided to go a bit bigger and make a 3D printed building with an interior and -of course- an exterior. The building will house my rail infrastructure maintenance contractor (I am a civil engineer, so I don't build a bakery). The building will be part of my MOW yard. The yard will have 4 tracks, 3 for storage with a gantry crane and one track that ends inside the main building.
Let me be clear, this is as much a project as it is a test. I have no idea if it will be what I hope it will be, but it will definitely give me some more experience in 3D building.
This is the main plan for the yard. The yard is 300x500mm (red lines). The building can be viewed from this angle or from the rear, which is open and shows the interior.
The main building will look like this:
The print arrived exactly when my vacation started. The building came out ok. I had it printed in polished White Strong&Flexible. I had some thin parts which I knew might not survive the printing and polishing. And I was right, they didn't survive. 2 down spouts, the dividing beams in the windows and a railing were wiped out. 2 down spouts were bent but fixable.
The front of the building with the large rollup door for the rail access:
The side with the lower overhead door. The down spout on the right has been removed. I'll order that in FUD with my next order. The other down spouts are still in limbo, I'll try heating them and straighten them.
The inside, with the overhead door and stairs in FUD. The first floor will for now house some storage. Later on I might give the little plastic guys a big plastic break room up there. The railings on the platform were reduced to stumps in the polisher I think. The horizontal beam is for the overhead crane, which I forgot to put into the order. That comes later. The roof is a bit transparent (the picture was taken near a south facing window on a sunny day), but that will be gone after one or two coats of paint on the roof and the ceiling. I might put fine black sanding paper on the roof.
The overhead door should be able to slide up, but doesn't seem to want to do that yet. It can be stored in the horizontal part of the rail when it's open.
The area under the platform will get warehouse style racks for pallets, barrels etc. I'll show the forklift I ordered later on. I also made some pallet jacks and pallets exactly to scale. The rack will be phase 2. A coffee machine could also be in phase 2, next to the door.
In this test setup you see the building can house an engine or a single car for light maintenance.
Not all parts can be printed in WSF, some delicate parts had to be printed in FUD (
stairs, stop/go signals,
overhead door and my test run of
pallets and
pallet jacks for when the warehouse section is finished):
Here's the front after the first coats of paint. It is printed in White Strong&Flexible and I put on a coat of white primer first, to prevent paint bleed through the walls (walls are all >1mm thick, but I wanted to be sure). I attached one stop/go signal next to the door. There will be at least one more on the inside, maybe I'll put one on each side of the door.
Next up is deciding which colors to use on the inside...
I'll update this thread as my build continues.
Erik
