Quiet earth (was: Exercise module for Plettenberg railroad in 1/22.5 scale)

[lab-dad]

for "better" LED's try ngineering dot com
They/he is the most prolific site I have seen for them.

-Marty

[artizen]

Cool site for tiny lighting! The range of outputs is huge.

If you already have the LEDs, you could try painting them to reduce the intensity or throttling them back with a stronger resistor. Too much resistance, and they end up looking like weak candles without changing the colour output. So far, my 20cm strip of 12 x 3V LEDs have been continually lit up for over 550 hours off just two cheap alkaline AA batteries. The output is slowly diminishing but I expect to get to 600 hours before they seem too weak for interior lighting of my carriage kits (or maybe that's a good idea?).

[Hydrostat]

Warning: this topic has not been posted in for at least 120 days.
Unless you're sure you want to reply, please consider starting a new topic.

Okay. I'm to slow. But yes, I want to reply.

Nevertheless thank's for your hints for LED's. Maybe I'll be in the market for them soon ...

At least at German Buntbahn and here for sure, too, I told that the main building may house the company's drawing office. Since I cheated my way through the upper floor with a barren hallway with plant and a modest just as representative office with lamp this empty lower floor yawns to me. Unfortunately no computers and plotters belong to a Fiftie's drawing office but rather those old style drawing machines / boards. I found them a bit - let me say - difficult to model and not to compelling as a necessary evil. Well, I kicked it down the road, until ... I stopped kicking it down the road. It's unsatisfactory to have an unfinished exercise module .

First I wanted to know what a drawing board looked like in the Fifties. The Kuhlmann company from Wilhelmshaven was the most successfull and famous company at least in Germany. Of course their production ceased with computer invention and the today existing legal successor KUHLMANN Werkzeugmaschinen + Service GmbH makes something completely different now. My first inquiry failed because they don't have any plans or even knowledge of those drawing boards anymore. But they gave me the address of a spare part dealer, who maintaines the few remaining machines. Obviously some big companies tend to keep one "analogue" workplace for fast sketches - sometimes seems to be much faster than with CAD. But this man couldn't provide information about those ol' Fiftie's machines - but he had something much more valuable: A contact to a former Kuhlmann engineer, who developed drawing machines in the Fifties! This man was happy that someone was interested in his former work and provided all information needed for making a scale replica of a machine, which is preserved for museum purposes. Aside of some interesting distractions (I'll keep you informed) this acquaintance was the cornerstone for modeling the item, which took a long time. Here it is:











There are only three more to come to fill the office. And some furniture and lighting ...


Cheers,
Volker

[Bill Gill]

That is very nice work and a piece of equipment you don't see modeled that often...in fact, have never seen it modeled before. Well done with both the idea and its execution.

[Ray Dunakin]

What an interesting and unusual modeling subject, and you've replicated it perfectly!

[finescalerr]

Extremely adequate. -- Russ

[Lawton Maner]

Just like mine except the board is a little smaller and mine is setup left-handed because I don't need specialized tools made for the right-handed.

Add a lamp on the top and a table with a cup of coffee and an ashtray on it and you are finished.

[1-32]

but volker
does it work?

[Hydrostat]

Hi,

Bill, Ray and Russ, thank you.

Just like mine except the board is a little smaller and mine is setup left-handed because I don't need specialized tools made for the right-handed.

Add a lamp on the top and a table with a cup of coffee and an ashtray on it and you are finished.

Thanks, Lawton, some kind of lighting, a technical drawing and some furniture is still to come.

but volker
does it work?

Kim, it makes a lot of work, for sure  .

I didn't take too many pictures building the prototype but I'll add some when going into the series.

This was predominant CAD work. Most detail dimensions had to be estimated by the pictures I got. This made it interesting as well as time consumpting.








Construction regards to wall thickness of 0.3 mm at Shapeways' FXD. The rods are brass with 0.5 mm, 1 mm and 1.5 mm diameter. The printed parts are quite accurate and detailed, but I feel that still it's a long way to go until one can buy affordable prints with surfaces which don't need to be reworked; have a look at the weight. That's the reason why I added the nuts of the feets' connecting rods later on as brass parts. This allows to sand this noticeable surface completely. For sure wax printing allows much more, but it doesn't pay if there's no lot in cast brass to come.





One can see the combination of printed parts and brass rods here; the detent linkage from the footstep is still to come. I wanted to have a prototypical wall thickness of those green angle sections at the unpainted wooden parts, which is no problem if they're part of the printed body, but their other branch would be too thin. So I made them rather thick and notched the board accordingly minus the wanted wall thickness. This helps with painting, too, but please be lenient; there's room for improvement at the lot.











Detent linkage:








Parallelogram guides are made of 0.2 mm etched stainless steel and soldered to each other.











Helmut kindly added two items I could not have done with my options - guess which ones!


Cheers,
Volker

[Bill Gill]

What is imressive about this project is the planning to use the strengths of the various materials and processes while avoiding their shortcomings. That of of course includes having Helmut fabricate those parts that probably couldn't be done any other way.

[Ray Dunakin]

The close up shots just leave me even more impressed!

[michael mott]

Volker, very nice, very nice indeed. Those types of drafting machines were very handy, I used to use a north American type called Norman Wade. I still prefer a parallel rule type though.

Michael

[1-32]

well volker i guess it does work .i should have known better to think it is a static model.
cheers kim

[Hydrostat]

Hi,

What is imressive about this project is the planning to use the strengths of the various materials and processes while avoiding their shortcomings. That of of course includes having Helmut fabricate those parts that probably couldn't be done any other way.

um, obviously nobody wants to guess ... Bill, of course you're right. Helmut milled the ruler with the scales from 0.5 mm Vivak and even managed to mill slots for the etched parts from both sides. The other part is the white board with the slots for the printed parts. How should I have got them that precise into the panel? For a straight panel with smooth surface 3D printing wouldn't be the best approach. Comparing both pics one can see how deep the printed part immerses into the panel:








The slots are milled with 5/100 mm backlash. Helmut used 1 mm Pertinax and airbrushed it white. Pertinax is a long term dimensionally stable material and stronger than PS or Plexiglass, which I wanted Helmut to use in the beginning, but his choice was better for sure. The drawings for the milling process can easily be exported as *.dxf from the CAD. So are the single parts for the etchings, which then were combined in a graphics program.





For printing all parts are linked with 1 mm rods. The spacings allow cutting the parts off the rods; for printing prposes they could nearly touch each other.





Thanks for your posts, Ray, Michael and Kim!

Cheers,
Volker

[Design-HSB]

Hello everybody,

so here come the images back to the drawing board to the production to better show.


Here, the cut-outs can be clearly seen.


Thus since the airbrush painting any color gets into the cutouts, I milled matching filler made of brass.


The varnished with airbrush gun back of the drawing board.