3D Printing Gadgets
Why 3D printing? The answer is simple. Availability, or lack thereof. I used to carefully craft structures using styrene plastic in my HO days, but generally when kitbashing a readily available building kit or other feature. That works well for an inside layout, protected from the elements, and the pounding of puppy paws. Between the already limited availability of anything garden scale related and the fragile nature of anything entirely plastic left to bake in sun, it's difficult to model a credible scene, let alone a lasting one.
We started with display windows for our storefront apartment castings. Next was replacement battery boxes to house the components for our passenger car LED strip lighting. From there, impromptu roller bearing run in stand components after quickly growing weary of locomotives lying on their sides to test our motor controllers. We even spooked up our Halloween Ghost Town by "skinning" concrete blocks with convincing brick walls without all the casting.
We started with display windows and windows frames for the upper floors of our Storefront Apartment castings.
We progressed to the battery box and controller components for our passenger car lighting.
Then we made our own inexpensive, infinitely adjustable, roller bearing run in stand adapters!
The more we designed and printed, the more experience we gained. Experience with drafting and CAD tools. Experience with 3D printer settings and slicing. Experience with the limitations of 3D printing. It's been an enjoyable experience... Well, mostly anyway. Fighting with hot end clogs and struggling with print bed adhesion failures can try anyone's patience. But we worked through the issues and made the corrections necessary to get the job done.
One limitation we're always working around is limited print volume. Designing for anything more than roughly 8" x 8" square by about 9" tall requires more than one print to complete. That means joining those multiple pieces together as one solid unit in most cases. A good example is "skinning" the Grand Hotel. By "skinning", we mean wrapping multiple concrete blocks with a plastic "skin", complete with textures and other features, like doors and windows. The two choices are "glue" or "snap fit". We've used both. Chloroform acts as a solvent for PLA, a plastic cement of sorts, like styrene model cement.
The culmination of all these experiences led to making Lithophanes as Christmas gifts. A Lithophane is printed using transparent filament, and by varying the thickness of the thin print, a sort of black & white picture effect is created. Generally a photo of a specified size is uploaded to an online site and it spits out the STL to be downloaded and printed. When backlit by a diffuse light source, using one of our light controllers, it appears almost as if three dmiensional in nature. The best part? They can be color too! Click below to read more about the process.
We started with dozens of 5" x 8" walls, and various other "joiner" pieces, to create one skin 8" deep by 32" long by 15" tall.
We combined our lighting controller components with 3D printed pictures and frames into lithophanes.