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

[Chuck Doan]

Very nice result. Nice to see the process.

[Hydrostat]

Thanks, Russ, Ray and Chuck.

Still those both rods were missing; the slotted centric round end and a 45° twisted rectangular square at the other end made it somewhat difficult to fabricate them.



Well, here we go.





Again it started with that jerky CAD thingy.





The rods don't suit for 3D printing. They are a bit long and I don't trust the plastic material to be form stable over long time. Helmut and Frithjof offered their help with milling the items, but I decided to do it the old fashioned way. What else do I have a vise with prisms for?





It took one hour to file both items from hard brass. I think milling them would have taken the same time. Since those parts don't have to be functional it doesn't come down to a tenth.





The slotted round segments are soldered tubes of different diameters. The inner diameter of the smallest tube is a bit bigger than the slot's diameter. This tube protrudes about 5 mm. I cut the slot into the protruding tube and the other tubes down to the desired length. Then i soldered tubes to the protruding part, which serves as a jig for alignment. After some filing and sanding in the drill chuck:





Some putty patches the inner cavitys.





Then the rods had to be drilled centrically. This doesn't work with a simple bench drill. So I drilled about 1 mm smaller holes than needed and used a milling cutter with the Dremel to widen them by sense of proportion. The tubes are soldered to the rods. I protected the soldered and spackled parts with tooth paste against heat.





A test mounting showed that the parts even would fit together.





But the items are only going to lie in the yard. For that coloring seems more important than precise shaping. The rods should get the appearence of rolled steel. After burnishing them with Gravoxide I used Humbrol silver Nr. 11 and Revell thinner for the effect.














Cheers,
Volker

[nk]

That is so convincing. I really like the degradation of the coating on the steel. And thanks for thestep by step. Its always nice to see how things get to the final wonderful result through a certain amount of trial and error.

[Ray Dunakin]

Very nice work!

[finescalerr]

You make it look easy. -- Russ

[Hydrostat]

Thanks, Narayan, Ray and Russ!

There are only a few days left until the "Lahnsteiner Modellbautage" and the electronic device for the desk lamp conked out. This gave the last impact to provide another, hidden power supply for the desk, which heretofore came via scale plug and socket. The items simply don't stand frequent plugging and unplugging. Now there was an unused current-carrying socket. This couldn't remain this way:





All floor lamp parts comes straight from the scrap box. The plate was part of any plastic kit of unknown origin. The metal part carrying the stand is part of a tusche pen. Lamp shade was the reflector of an early micro flashlight. Well, the globe was a globe.





Stand consists of two soldered 1 and 0.8 mm hypodermic needles.








Cheers,
Volker

[finescalerr]

This is getting scary. Is anybody else frightened? -- ssuR

[artizen]

In awe - not frightened.

[Ray Dunakin]

Astounded.

[Chuck Doan]

Reminds me of the movie Luxo Jr.

[finescalerr]

Chuck, go stand in the corner! -- Russ

[Hydrostat]

No, don't. There's this floor lamp.

[Bill Gill]

This is all terrific to follow along. I really like how you easily switch from 3D printing to hand filing to using assorted scraps to make wonderful models.

[Hydrostat]

Thanks for your praise, Bill. Please excuse my delay in answering - I'm trying to add something essential every time I post. I spent a lot of time browsing your NEB&W FB page; that's a really stunning layout and I like this historical "reverse modeling" approach very much. And it's very nice to see how many people are working together there with obviously very similar notions of modeling.

This is all terrific to follow along. I really like how you easily switch from 3D printing to hand filing to using assorted scraps to make wonderful models.

This is a bit born out of necessity. I really would like to call a cnc mill my own, but there's no room for that at the moment.

There's a new item for the exercise module: the chairman's chair.














Cheers,
Volker

[Ray Dunakin]

Ah, I see they have giant coins in the EU too! It looks great on that full-size chair.