thibaultron

Just got an e-mail from the 3D printing company, the winch parts were successfully printed and in the mail.

Received word today that my winch files have passed muster at the 3D printers. They are in the queue for printing. Today I'm starting on the rearranging of the shop to move the HO layout into the new area. My workbench is in a section of the layout supports, so when it is moved, I can start work again.

One of the model railroad suppliers sells Rivet Detail decals. These are clear film strips with raised rivet heads on the strip. No idea how they do the raised detail, but they look good when used.

Yea, just go over there and old "Five Finger" willie will teach you about shop safety.

While the mast being thickest at deck level, is true for most ships, be careful, on smaller ones at least. The plans for the Chesapeake Bay skipjack (a 30 to 60' sail powered oyster dredger) I am working on, and another in the wings, both are thickest a couple feet above the deck, then start the tapered octagonal shape as they go toward the foot. They are about 1" narrower when they enter the deck. I don't know if there are any others where this happens, it might have been a regional thing.

I considered photo-etch, but the round axle bearing areas on the top of the legs would be hard to do in photo-etch in both scales. I don't think I could fabricate them in 1/64th scale, that engine for the push boat was bad enough. The handles for the clutch and pawl, would be really small. Photo-etch would work for the lower portion of the legs, the pawl gear itself, but not the shaft. I also have no idea how the clutch body would be done in photo-etch. I've never used either process. I will see how the 3D printed parts come out, if they do. For parts that can be fabricated as flat parts, and folded (railings, gun tubs, etc.) the photo-etch would work. Look at all the detail sets for the plastic models. There are some very complex kits for HO scale, but building one takes real skill. To solder the joints they use a resistance soldering unit. These run about $500, way over my income level. CA would work for many of our parts that will never be touched again, after being installed, but anything that required handling needs to be soldered. This is really a question for more experienced modelers. My 2 cents worth.

Sorry The title is wrong. I'm asking if anyone is interested in a tutorial on converting a 2D drawing to a 3D printed model. I started another thread asking the question.

I recently drew up a hand powered dredge winch (about 3' X 3' X 2' in full scale), in a 2D CAD program, then went to a 3D model in SketchUp, then to an acceptable STL file to be printed by Shapeways. Would anyone be interested in a thread on the process, and some of the pitfalls along the way? The winch pushes the limits of their tech, when translated to both 1/32nd and 1/64th scale printed models. The winch is for my Carrie Price Skipjack model, in another build thread, but I thought that this subject would be more suitable for a wider audience.

Part 25 I spent the last couple of weeks translating my winch drawing from the 2D CAD drawing to a 3D drawing acceptable for the Shapeways company to print. I choose Shapeways because I have heard about them often on my model railroad forums. There are also other companies that do the 3D printing. I used the Google SketchUp program to create the 3D drawing. This program is available as a free version, with some of the features of the purchased program disabled. The disabled features are not needed to create a drawing for a modeler. I have both an older Pro version, and the latest free version. The only Pro feature I used was the importing of the 2D CAD file. The free version will only import picture format files. You could convert your CAD to one of these formats to use with the free version, or just start from scratch using your drawing for reference. After importing it I switched to the newer free version. The pro version is $700, so you will most likely be using the free one. There were some pitfalls along the way, as the parts had to be drawn in a certain “philosophy”, for lack of a better word. I may be doing another thread on just this process, if I find any interest. The files still have to go through their manual check process. I do not think there will be any problems that will make them unprintable. If there are, they will refund your money, and tell you what has to be corrected. Anyway here are some pictures of the finished drawings. This is the drawing for the 1/32nd parts. There are enough for 4 winches in this one. It only cost a little more than just printing two winches, and allows me to break something while assembling the model. Shapeways charged about $20 total + shipping to print this one. Here I found a mistake after paying for a copy. SketchUp has a feature (one of the free plugins) that checks for problems and corrects them. You have to recheck your drawing after doing this, as sometimes it “corrects” the drawing, by deleting offending parts! This happened when I checked this drawing, and I missed it. Look at the leg at the lower left. The bosses for the support rods are missing at the bottom of the legs. Compare it to the leg on the right. Rather than correct the file and print a new one, I corrected it, and made a new file with just the four corrected legs. This print was about $9, and I got it in soon enough that they will include it with my first order, so I didn’t have additional shipping. Back to the first drawing. The handle for the clutch mechanism, and the pawl were too small to print individually, so I added them to the one leg. They are small and have a lot of curves, so attaching them to a sprue would have left a lot of trimming to do. Likewise the clutch end of the drum, and the clutch were combined (the thing that resembles a hat, above the legs. When I go to assemble the model, I will separate them. I left a “channel” between the drum and clutch parts to aid in guiding the saw. The long “thing” between the legs are the nuts for the model on a sprue. Once again an individual nut was too small to print. Some of the nuts will be attached to the back of the legs, which for printing have flat backs. There is also a foot at the handle to crank arm joint, to support the part during printing. I will sand this off of the finished piece. The 1/32nd model is designed to have an axle to string the drum, clutch, pawl gear, and crank handles. The supports and axle will be metal rods. The leg webs on the 32nd model are about scale ½” for the “walls” and back. This is close to the minimum requirements for printing (.3mm). The 1/64th scale version had to have some major modifications done, to satisfy the minimum thicknesses that could be printed (.3mm). The leg webs had to be thickened. For the plain leg this was not a problem, I just made them thicker. I will sand the back and straight sides to thin them closer to scale. Notice that the axle, is cast in place for the handle. There is a hole in the back for the clutch and drum assembly. Both legs are setup this way. The pawl gear end leg presented some problems. The top of the leg has bosses for the pawl and clutch handle. Thickening the whole length would have destroyed the leg to boss transition curves. At this transition area, though, the scale leg was already thick enough. I therefore only thinned the lower straight section of the leg, and will sand this straight section to thin and blend it. The web at the back of the leg also had to be thickened to about 0.9” in scale. It is flat on the back, so sanding it down to ½” scale will not present a problem. Once again the final print is four winches, to allow for mistakes. Unfortunately the pawl and clutch handle had to be significantly thickened.. For the pawl I will just leave it as is. For the handle I thickened it on the inside so that it will be somewhat easier to thin it, and errors will be better hidden. Trying to use a metal axle for this scale was an unreasonable (for my skill level) fiddly idea. So for this leg I inserted the pawl gear into the assembly. The clutch is now on its own base. Trying to cut it from the drum would have been tricky, and now the axle is cast as part of it. The drum end has a hole for the axle to fit in, and the back has a recess for the drum shaft. The shaft end of the drum is hollow. Here I will use a short piece of metal for the axle, but I will have that long hole to allow for adjusting the rod. For both legs I made the little decoration at the foot separate parts. They will be attached after the leg webs have been sanded (he says confidently. Hope springs eternal). I was able to also print the nuts, but had to use a much smaller hole. I will drill these out to scale, using that hole as a guide. The supports will be metal, but simply string through everything Here are the small parts on their sprue. The handle for the cranks are square at the end, for printing. I will round them off. The clutch axle is overly long, and will be trimmed to fit. On both models I have a surplus of nuts, as I’m sure some of them will disappear or be damaged during assembly. This file cost about $8 + shipping from them. Shapeways still has to do the manual checks, which I should get a, hopefully, OK this week, and they will be print sometime in the following week. I just hope my building skills are up to the 1/64th winch assembly. The plastic that these will be printed in is somewhat brittle, but the only one with fine enough detail to do the job. I would have to significantly thicken everything to use a different plastic, and the 1/64th parts would not be printable at all. If there is interest I will make these available publicly from Shapeways.

I recently drew up a hand powered dredge winch (about 3' X 3' X 2' in full scale), in a 2D CAD program, then went to a 3D model in SketchUp, then to an acceptable STL file to be printed by Shapeways. Would anyone be interested in a thread on the process, and some of the pitfalls along the way? The winch pushes the limits of their tech, when translated to both 1/32nd and 1/64th scale printed models. The winch is for my Carrie Price Skipjack model, in another build thread, but I thought that this subject would be more suitable for a wider audience.

Belt/disk sander, followed closely by a drill press.

Well. Back to the drawing board, literally! Shapeways minimum thickness is .012". This translates to 3/4+" in 1/64th scale. Many of my wall thicknesses are 1/2", for a true scale part (and this is thicker than I think it would be in real life, more like 1/4 to 3/8 thick webs). At least I have practice. I can probably use the existing drawing for the larger scales.

Part 24 Over the last few days I learned enough about SketchUp to make these drawings of the hand dredge as a solid model. Real SketchUp draftsmen would probably cringe. I had to go back and redraw many of the parts several times, trying different ways of creating them. The next step is to contact the 3D printing company, and see if the drawing can be printed. I’m sure there will be more needed before they are acceptable. There is an extra pawl support arm (the one sticking vertically out of the one leg), as I’m not sure that the leg can be printed with it attached.

Thanks, for the help!

In the past I have had metal lathes. I always protected and lubed them with various oils. Now I have a small one that I will be using mostly for wood and plastic parts. Lube oils and wood make a bad combination, as the oil would invariably end up on the wood. If any of you have lathes what do you use to protect the sliding surfaces from wear and rust?

Tadeusz: What do you use to prtect your lathe from rust, and do you lubricate the sliding surfaces, if so with what?

Here are the drawings with labels, to clarify the construction. I will not be posting a 3D drawing. My CAD program leaves lots of lines that should be "hidden" in the 3D drawings, and it takes 10 to 20 hours to erase them from the 2D views. I will be using SketchUp to do the 3D drawings, so that I have the option to send this out for 3D printing. First I have to learn SketchUp though, so it may be a while.

Part 24 Finished the 2D drawing of the dredge winch using the measurements Mahune posted. In the original drawings I assumed that the width of the legs was the same as the length between them, a square footprint. With the new measurements, this made the legs quite clunky, and squat looking, not like the spindly legs shown in other photos. So for this drawing I just rescaled the legs to 33" between the base and the center of the axle. The legs looked better this way. I did redraw the legs so that the edges were on reasonable inches and fractions likely to be used at the time. ie. 23 1/4" (24.25") as opposed to 23. 234". The legs had been drawn this way, but when rescaled the measurements got funcky. The rest was redrawn per the new dimensions. Here is the drawing. I broke it up into 2 pictures for better viewing. The scale of the two drawings is not the same, as I was trying to get maximum size per drawing within the 1600 X 1200 pixel site limits.

Definition of a boat - A hole in the water you pour money into.

Dang! I wish I had $2500, though I live 100 miles from the ocean, so it might be a little hard to sail her.

Nope, proportions are off to much, will have to redraw most of it. I love modeling, I love modeling, sigh.

Thanks for the info. Looks like I have some redrawing to do, but I think I got it close in most proportions. For my drawings I assumed 36" for axle height, 27" for the base length, and 15 for the drum dia. Now I can get it closer using your dimensions. CAD is sometimes a pain, but a lot easier for making corrections.

Measurements would be greatly appericated!

PART 23 I redrew the dredge winch during my Florida trip. One off the close up pictures I was sent. Here is the old drawing from the small photo I had. The 2D drawing of the winch and sub-assemblies. I shortened the handles, like I talked about in the earlier post. They are 23" long rather than 36". I think that is more reasonable for one man. The drawing of the Clutch engagement lever (left) and the Pawl (right). This is the front and back 3D views of the redrawn winch. Now that I am home again I'll be doing more work on the model. Finishing some details on the hull, and starting painting it.

No building has gotten done, I'm away from home, but I have been able to do a better drawing of the dredge winches. Thanks to another member, I have some pictures of one in a Chesapeake Bay museum. This was the same one I based the old drawing on, but with a small photo to work from. Here is the old drawing. An overall of the new drawing, with the better photos. The drawing itself. The next task is doing a 3D drawing, then draw it in SketchUp, a 3D modeling CAD program. The crank handles are, I think, overly long. Compared to the old picture they are about half again as long. I think they extended the handles so that the museum could bolt them to the display (see the pictures).