No Smoke Without Fire

In the previous post I showed you the flickering fire and smoke effects I'd added to the scalescenes.com factory I've built for Jerusalem, but I left out one detail; the control board.

I did mention that the power comes from a 19V DC power adaptor liberated from a cheap OO gauge train set, but here you can see how that adaptor gets included in the setup. Yes this is what I was really producing when I was experimenting with laser engraving.

The datasheets for the power socket and switches contain accurate dimension information which I used to design the control board using the same techniques as the previous example of laser etching I showed. Even given the precision of the laser cutting and the accuracy of the dimensions I was slightly surprised when everything fitted together perfectly on the first attempt.

The final task was to wire everything together to provide power for the fire and smoke. Given that you can't really have smoke without fire, I've connected the switches so that you can turn the fire on without the smoke, but to get the smoke working as well you need to have both switches turned on. I'm really happy with how this all turned out, it's just a shame that the control panel will be hidden behind the backscene out of view when the layout is finished. Mind you I do have three more control panels should I wish to show them off (I thought I might need to modify the holes slightly and didn't know how resilient the acrylic would be so used up the small sheet with some spares).

Modelling With Lasers

One of the reasons I like using 3D printing to help produce models and parts for railway modelling is that I can spend hours tweaking a model on the computer, knowing that I can easily revert back to a previous version. Once I'm happy I can then print as many copies of the model as I want, safe in the knowledge that each will be identical; not something I could guarantee if I was building the model from a kit as my modelling skills aren't that accurate. For the same reasons I've been thinking about using laser cutting for a number of projects. In a future blog post you'll see what I was actually wanting to create, but here I want to show you what I did with the off-cut of acrylic.

When I opened Penistone Railway Works I designed the logo to follow in the age old railway tradition of makers plates. These were usually made from brass and bolted to the cab side of each locomotive to record when and where it was made (very useful for knowing who to contact for spare parts) and the tradition lives on with many modellers producing etched brass versions for their models. So turning the logo for Penistone Railway Works into a physical item seemed like a good use of the spare corner of acrylic. It's difficult to judge the size from the photo but it measures 5.4cm across and I had acrylic left over as the online service I used, RazorLAB, offer each of their materials in one of three sizes; 7, 15 or 31 inches square. I was using the smallest size but I didn't need the entire sheet, hence the makers plate.

I had used InkScape to draw the original logo as an SVG file so that I could easily scale it to produce different sized versions (SVG does stand for Scalable Vector Graphics after all), and RazorLAB uses SVG files to guide the laser cutter so it was the work of only a few minutes to tweak the logo for cutting. Just as with Shapeways, for 3D printing, the process is very simple; upload the file, select the material, pay, and then wait for the postman. I choose to use the 3mm black acrylic as it fit perfectly with my main usage (which will get blogged about at some point), but they will also cut corrugated card, felt, mountboard, plywood, and MDF with many of the materials available in different colours and thicknesses which would open up a range of interesting possibilities.