By The Devil, It's Big!

If you remember back a few months the initial motivation behind the 16mm scale Hudson Hunslet model came from a request to simply "scale up" the 4mm scale version I'd previously built. Well now I've finished it we can have a look at the two models side by side...

As you can see the 16mm scale version is an absolute monster in comparison! Either that or the 4mm version really is ridiculsouly small. To be fair I think both things are actually true.

If you've not been following along over on YouTube then there is a 25 part playlist documenting the iterative process to go from the 4mm version to the 16mm one which you might find interesting if you want all the gory details. If you just want the highlights then enjoy...

And if you want to build your own 16mm scale model then I'm making the 3D printed parts and the metal cowl available as a scratch aid kit. Full details are in the video and there is a link to a contact form in the video description where you can register your interest in one.

Lots More Metal Forming

I don't know how many people read this blog without also subscribing to my YouTube channel, but if you've not seen them yet here are the most recent videos in the saga of metal forming.

Model #7

For some reason I forogt to post on Monday when I uploaded a new video looking at another model I've built. Anyway, here we are with another 16mm scale model which includes lots of additional detailing parts that I designed and 3D printed.

Metal Forming

I've just realised that I've not posted any if the video updates on the 16mm Hudson-Hunslet project to the blog recently. Hopefuly you are all subscribed to the YouTube channel so have seen them already but if not then there are three new episodes to bring you up to speed all of which revolve around metal shapes and metal forming.

Magnetic Side Panels

A short update on the 16mm scale Hudson-Hunslet build involving the side panels and some tiny magnets

Broken But Moving

It's taken a while (work and family commitments meant not much time for modelling) but U've finally got a little further with the 16mm scale build of the 24hp Hudson-Hunslet diesel loco.

Feet in the Footwell

Two videos in todays post, both of which are about finally sorting the footwell problem

Dots Per Inch

I now know why the paper test "etches" didn't fit properly...

Cast Off Parts, But a Working Model

So for part three of this design/build process I decied to see what would happen if I simply stuck all the parts I'd printed together, even though there is something wrong with nearly all of them.

I'm intending to post most of the videos for this project to the blog, but if you want to make sure you don't miss any then you can use this link to subscribe to my YouTube channel.

Large Scale Progress

Having introduced the idea of building a 16mm scale version of the 24hp Hudson Hunslet in the previous post, I've now done a small amount more work. Specifically I've managed to print a chassis that will hold the wheels and motor.... although due to a slight design flaw it won't fit on the track yet! Rather than lots of text explaining things, and because no one complained about the last video post I did, here is the current state of play

Little and (Ridiculously) Large

Those of you who have been following my modelling for a while will know that the first locomotive I designed was for the rather small 24hp Hudson-Hunslet. This was an 009 kit and so given the small size of the prototype was absolutely tiny, ridiculously so. The kit has been wonderfully successful, but of course not everyone models in 009.

When I was producing the 16mm Simplex detailing parts I was asked if it was possible to scale the Hudson-Hunslet kit up to 16mm. My initial answer was... I've no idea. After a little thought I did wonder if I could use the P.S Models Hudson-Hunslet chassis kit and then design a body to fit. Unfortunately while the chassis is almost exactly the right length it's way, way too wide. Thinning it down might be possible, but it would involves taking a strip of each side of the footplate and both buffers and getting that all square sounds like a lot of hard work.

Now obviously given I already have the CAD files for the 4mm to the foot version I can just scale that up to make something four times as big and see if it would print. Unfortunately when I tried that I discovered that while the footplate will fit within my printer if I add the buffer beams (i.e. another 5mm or so) it won't fit. Fortunately with the way my CAD files work I can just remove pieces (like the buffers) and so as a test I printed two buffer beams, and then the central section and stuck them together. I also printed the radiator (including the parts that are etched on the 009 version) to give me a better idea of what a completed model might look like and well....

It's huge, at least in comparison to the 009 version; I'm not sure which end of the scale is the more ridiculous.

Having proven that I can at least print the parts and produce the chassis, I will probably keep going and produce a model for myself. While scaling the CAD for the body should be reasonably simple I need to design a new drive system and work out how it will all assemble, but it looks like I have another design project on the go.

And yes before anyone mentions it, I did take the photograph with the radiator balanced on the rear of the chassis not the front. Ooops.

Signs of Life

Given how sporadic, or none existant, posts have been over the last year or so I've no idea if anyone is still reading this blog, but believe it or not there are signs of some modelling happening!

Some of you may remember that for Christmas all the way back in 2016 I was bought a kit for building an OO guage model of Ivor the Engine. This was a nice present and the first from my then newly born son, Toby. Well Toby, is now five and a half, and I now have a second son, Thomas, who is 14 months old. What I don't have though is a completed model of Ivor the Engine.

The last time I blogged about the kit was almost four years ago in August of 2018 when everything had gone horribly wrong: I'd broken the wheel holding tool for my lathe and the wheels I had made, although correct to the instructions, didn't fit in the model. At that point I put the kit away in a box, never expecting it to be four years before it would appear again.

So where are we know? Well, fohrmann-WERKZEUGE were very helpful and sold me replacement parts for the wheel holding tool which saved me quite a bit of money over buying a complete replacement. Of course any money saved was then spent on having new set of wheels produced. These are essentially they same as last time (lost wax brass castings using 3D printed waxes all done through Shapeways) albeit slightly smaller to solve the main issue that arose with the originals.

So far all I've done is separate the wheels and drill out the axle hole to 2mm, but as you can see roughly placing them against the chassis suggests that they will fit this time, especially given they will be fractionally smaller once I've turned them on the lathe to properly profile the edge and add the flange.

I've no idea when I'll get to do more work on the wheels but hopefully it won't take four years before there is more to report.

The Ghost In The Sleeper

Wooden railway sleepers don't last forever and often need replacing. The wood is of course still useable for other things. For example, it's not hard to find old sleepers used as fence posts. Such uses of old sleepers are easy to spot as, apart from their fairly standard size, you can usually see the impression left by the rail chair including holes where they were bolted down. Whilst you may see similar fences on model railways, how many modellers go to the trouble of modelling the ghost of the rail chair?

Whilst most people might not bother with such small details some people like to go the extra mile to make their models as lifelike as they can. One such person contacted me last year to ask if it would be possible to design a tool that would make it nice and easy to add these marks to 7mm to the foot scale sleepers.

The design work was relatively easy as I managed to track down a drawing for a rail chair (specifically a four bolt version used by the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway) which I used to produce a 3D printed prototype on my resin printer. This was then tested using some of my son's Playdoh.

Of course the resin version is unlikely to hold up to repeated use being hammered into wooden sleepers, but having proved that the pattern it left seemed right, a little more work got me to a an easy to use tool that I could have 3D printed in brass.

Of course once the brass version arrived I couldn't resist giving it a go before posting it on to it's new home.

I think that looks pretty good, and as it takes just seconds to add the marks it's easy enough to quickly detail a large pile of sleepers ready to build a fence or maybe for an old siding where the rails have been removed. Given how many different ways old sleepers get used the possibilites are endless.

If you want to add rail chair details to your own 7mm scale model landscape then I've made the tool available to buy on Shapeways (see here).

While four bolt chairs were fairly common, I do have drawings for rail chairs from other companies which (given time) I'm intending to use to produce a set of tools, but in the meantime if you want a tool to produce the ghost of a specific comapnies rail chair let me know and I'll do my best to help.

An Orange Simplex

I've not had much time for modelling lately so the work on completing the 16mm scale Simplex locomotive seems to have taken forever, but as you can see I finally got there.

Now I know most Simplex locos are painted a shade of green, but my four year old son was insistent that it had to be orange. I wasn't convinced by the idea at first but I'm actually really happy with how it looks and it certainly won't ever get lost in the garden! Strangely there is a prototype for painting Simplex locomotives this colour (in fact this exact shade of orange) as Alan Keef Ltd. paint their locos, inlcuding their hire locos, orange and over the years that has included a few Simplex locomotives.

So given the lack of dirt (I've not yet had the heart to weather the model) my back story is that it's just been over hauled and repainted by Alan Keef Ltd. and is now ready for it's first hire contract.

And to finish with here is a short video to show that it does actually work. Sorry about the shaky camera work, but I was controlling the locomotive via an app on my phone while also holding the camera and trying to ensure it didn't run off the end of the track!

Somewhere to Sit

One bit of detailing that you couldn't see in the previous post was the inside of the cab.

Now I know it's not the best of photos but hopefully you get the picture. As you can see I've retained the original brake stand and wheel from the kit, but the rest is all new. The kit originally had a flor cut to look like wooden planks which didn't seem to match any of the real locomotives so I switched this to some chequer plate. I was intending to use the seat that came in the kit as once the driver figure is in place you can't see it. I began to have second thoughts on this when I found it was a little tall and the roof wouldn't fit because the drivers head was too high. I was just going to trim the bottom of the parts to lower it down, but then discovered that I'd manage to loose one part of the seat. At this point I thought it was easier just to make a new one that more closely matched the real thing even if it will be completely hidden.

Oh and before anyone comments that the brake wheel is wonky, I know. I took the photo with the parts just resting together. When I glue it in place I'll make sure it's right.

A Simplex for the Garden

Having shown little bits and pieces related to the 16mm scale Simplex locomotive I'm currently building I thought I should really show some photos of the locomotive itself.

The model is based around a kit, designed by Phil Sharples, that I bought from eBay. I say "based around" as the kit consisted mostly of laser cut MDF parts and as you can see there are quite a few parts on mine which aren't MDF. I'd already shown sandboxes (not fitted in the photos) in a previous post, but you can see I've also printed a replacement radiator as well as coupling blocks, bolt heads and chassis side frames. There are also a few other detailing parts that I've replaced or added which you either can't see in the photo or which haven't been fitted yet. I've also replaced the plastic wheels that came with the kit with some nice steel ones. Still quite a lot of work to do but it's beginning to come together nicely and the 3D printer is proving very useful in helping me quickly producing detailing parts as I go along.

Yet More Details

As at least one person spotted the sandboxes in the previous post are designed to fit on a Simplex locomotive. My original test print was designed mostly to check the shape and to see if the hinge would work. The next step was to finish the lids with the details seen on the real thing.

There appears to be two common types of lid, one showing the Simplex logo and one giving the company name, although I've yet to work out if there was any pattern to which was fitted or if it was pot luck. Looking at photos some have one of each (you can usually only see the front ones as the rear ones are often in shadow inside the cab) and some have two of the Motor Rail Ltd version. I think, now I've done the design work for both, that I'll go with one of each.

I received a few other comments about sandboxes, mostly people saying that they often contain anything but sand. Apparently they are a good place to store spare coupling pins or the starting handle. Also it's not unheard of to open one only to find a mouse nest.

Okay, so I'm insane, but the idea of a mouse inside one of them was too much to resist. Fortunately I didn't have to do much to achieve this as I found a nice model of a mouse on Thingiverse which I scaled down and printed. Because it was so small I printed it sat on a fake floor that would just slot into one of the printed sandboxes.

And with that I think the sandboxes are now complete.

Too Many Details?

I've heard people suggest that the larger modelling scales are easier as the pieces are larger and easier to see. I really don't think this is true. In my experience, and I've talked about this before, what tends to happen is that as the scale goes up you end up modelling smaller details that wouldn't be visible or possible in the smaller scales. I'm fairly certain that there should be a limit to this though, for my sanity if nothing else, but I'm still not sure where the line should be drawn.

Whilst I may not know where the line between sensible and ridiculous should be drawn, I think I've got quite close with the latest bit of detail work. I'm slowly gathering parts together to complement a 16mm scale kit I'm going to build and one of the kit parts I wanted to replace was the sandboxes. They aren't a particularly complex shape and I have prototype drawings so it was easy enough to produce some using my 3D printer.

So far so sane.... except....

Yes, I designed them so that the hinge would work, the lids would open, and they could actually hold sand. Now my problem is that I need to find some finer sand, but have I finally gone insane or is this a perfectly acceptable level of detail?

Spot The Difference

Alongside building the tiny OO9 model of the 10hp Baguley I've been looking through the parts for a much larger 16mm scale kit I'm going to build shortly. I'm not intending to give any hints as to what the kit builds into as yet, but instead I want to talk about bolt detail.

The kit is mostly laser cur MDF parts and the bolt detail (which is quite prominent) on the prototype is represented by circles etched into the surface of the part. Clearly this doesn't give any relief meaning that the details will mostly disappear under a layer of paint. Now there are obviously many ways you could add more detail. Some people use dots of glue, others use brass rivets, and you can of course buy plastic nuts and bolts that can be glued in place. All of those are probably easier than what I choose to do, but then I own a 3D printer.

Whilst many of the parts are too complex to replicate in their entirety and will need individual bolts adding as details, there are four pieces that fit at the corners of the chassis. These are just 18mm by 10mm and have five bolts on each. These seemed like a sensible starting point to check things like the size of the bolt head etc.

It didn't take long to draw these up and print out some test pieces. The first print I made is on the left. I printed this at the normal settings I use, which means each layer of the print is 0.05mm thick. Unfortunately as you can see (especially if you click on the image for a full size version) the layering is very pronounced on each of the bolts and it is very clear that they are made from multiple layers. To the naked eye the layering is less obvious but I fear it would be highlighted by painting and weathering.

So the next print I did is the one on the right, which was printed using layers just 0.02mm thick. The layering is still just about visible in the photos but I can't see it with just my eyes. The problem of course is that printing at 0.02mm instead of 0.05mm takes a lot longer. On a piece this small, just 2.175mm thick, the print time is increaed from roughly 12 minutes to around 27 minutes. While that's not a huge problem, if I was printing a much bigger model the difference would get quite significant.

I was especially annoyed with the longer print time in this case as the 0.05mm layers are perfectly acceptable for the main rectangular piece which takes up most of the depth. When printed at 0.05mm there are 43 layers in total with 32 of them being for the slab and 11 for the bolt heads. When we print the same piece with 0.02mm layers then there are 109 layers with 80 for the slab and 29 for the bolts.

Some of you may remember that back in April of last year, I discovered that the layer height specified in the files the printer uses is actually ignored and each layer is instead given it's absolute position above the bottom of the resin vat. On that occassion I used this to essentially double expose a single layer of the print in order to improve the result. Having moved on to using a different resin (specifically the Elegoo water washable black resin) I've not needed to continue using this trick, but I decided that the use of absolute positioning rather than layer thickness meant I might be able to speed up printing parts like these.

So I took the two files I'd produced and merged them. This resulted in a file with 61 layers where the first 32 layers had a thickness of 0.05mm and the final 29 layers had a thickness of 0.02mm. It took roughly 16 minutes for this file to print and the result is in the middle. Even under a magnifying glass this print is indestinguishable from the one on the right where all the layers were printed at 0.02mm but took ten minutes less time to print. I'm calling this a success.

The same trick should make it quicker to print some other pieces in the future where I only care about the layer thickness in certain areas of the model. For instance, any model printed with supports doesn't need the supports printing at thinner layer thickness, so the print time could be reduced by using 0.05mm for the supports and 0.02mm for the first layer of model upwards.

Mix and Match

As you may remember from a previous post, my son quite likes his Duplo and even uses it to build locomotives and carriages. What I don't think I've mentioned before is the large collection of wooden railway stuff he's also built up.

It all started when he was given this starter set as a present on his first birthday. There are quite a few different brands of wooden railway, most of which all use the same standards and so can be used together. That means the collection has expended rapidly with sets and pieces from Bigjigs, BRIO, John Lewis (although their range seems to have been discontinued), and a few of the wooden Thomas locomotives; after all we definitely needed a Toby the Tram engine!

As you can see with all these bits the layouts he can build (or he gets us to build) can get quite large and complex. One problem, that occurs more frequently that you might expect, is that you end up with an almost perfect layout but where you end up trying to join either two male or two female ends together. We do have some short pieces that do this, but because of the standard lengths of the track pieces often they won't fit. When you have two male ends to fit together there is no alternative to a piece of track with two female ends, but when you want to join two female ends there is another solution. You could just have a very short pin with two male ends without the need for it to actually have any track, and hence it will have no length when fitted but will hold the two track pieces together.

Given that it must be a fairly common problem for everyone rather than designing something myself I had a quick look on Thingiverse to see if anyone else had already done the hard work for me. It turned out they had so I just downloaded the model and printed a bunch out on my resin printer.

As you can see the connector pieces weren't the only thing I printed. While hunting for the connector I came across an even more interesting piece that allows you to use Duplo to lift up the track meaning we could build longer raised sections than before, which Toby thought was a brilliant idea.

Whilst I love being able to experiment with new models quickly on the resin printer it is exceptionally great for parts like this. I'm sure if they were available commercially they would cost a lot more than the cost of the resin I used. Plus rather than waiting for them to be delivered I'd printed all of those within about three hours of starting (I did two print runs as not all of that would fit in the printer in one go). They were all printed flat on the build plate as well so the only clean up was washing off the excess resin.