Railroad Car Daa
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I started to work on the CAD model in February 2022. I wanted to design this as a kit, rather than a few huge parts one would print and paint. I ended up with about 140 parts. The whole design phase took about 2 months. Then, I had to put this project on a back burner, because life happened. However, I picked this is up over the holiday break and started to work on this mid-January.
The 3D printing took in about 220 hours. I used the 25 micron layers initially, so some parts took about 8 hours to print. Then, I switched to adaptive layering which significantly cut the print time down without sacrificing the surface detail too much. The parts are still not perfect and some surface preparation is still needed, but that is just the nature of the beast. I am very pleased with the design. I also engineered the kit so it would be possible to paint it easily - and this was a challenge, but a good one.
I decided to use Evergreen’s styrene for the long parts used in the chassis assembly. Mostly because I am not able to print parts this long. The styrene was very flexible and created some minor alignment problems which I would not have if these parts were from resin (which is much rigid).
I had some difficulties with the roof design. Originally, I planned to build individual ribs, glue them to longerons and cover the roof with copper foil. But the fit of the cooper pieces was really difficult to get right. So, I printed the roof in 2 parts, glued them together and created a sheet metal effect using a modeling paste. And I think the effect seems to be quite nice.
There is also Youtube Video
