3d Printing

I am certainly no expert on 3D printing, but the things you can do with this technology are endless and mind boggling. To me, it is a simple as it gets, you make a drawing, send it to the printer, in my case Shapeways.com, and they send you the part. Below is my first attempt. I drew the bench full scale, and then scaled it down to HO scale. Obviously, you can scale it to what ever you want, so if someone wanted this in O scale, I would just resize the drawing and submit it to the printer. I first drew one bench, the added enough to do what I needed, which was six. I sent the

drawings to shapeways.com and this what they sent me. Shapeways has a setup charge and then charges per cubic centimeter of material used. They have many different plastics and other materials to choose from. These benches were made with the Frosted Ultra Detail material http://www.shapeways.com/materials/frosted_detail . It will allow a minimum wall thickness of .03 mm, or a little more than an inch in HO scale. I primed them, and painted them. When finished, I installed them in the HOn30 passenger car they were designed for. Obviously they could be used for many purposes, church pews, etc.

If you don't get it, what 3D printers will do, check out this video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQ-aWFYT_SU

I have received my next batch of projects, and I in the process of painting them. Here are drawing of the next items. This is a hand operated hoist, based on one that was on the Milwaukee Road in Chillicothe, MO. The top piece is made to slide on to Evergreen brand 1/4" I-Beam. In other words, each of these pieces is barely over 1/4" in size. The prototype is a chain hoist, but because no one makes scale chain small enough for this project, I will be using thread to represent cable in place of the chain. I will be able to use chain in a couple places, but not all.

Next I have dump truck bed based on a 1942 IH design. I ordered this in Black Detail, with a minimum wall thickness of 1 mm, so some of the finer details did not print. I will have pictures of these ready to post this weekend, I hope.

The next item is a Capstan Winch Car Puller. On the chance that you don't know what a car puller is, well check out page 4 and page 16 at this link. http://www.laffeyequipment.com/1824_railcar&bargehandlingbrochure.pdf I have modeled all three pieces, and, again, should have pictures of the final product up this weekend.