3D printed diesel loco finished and on YouTube!

The 3D printed diesel loco is finished and working on the layout! Now if only I were that quick with Mrs. Woody's job list!

The windows have been glazed with Delux Glue and glaze and the chassis has been chipped!

 There is a YouTube video about it for your viewing pleasure or possible cure for insomnia!

Lucky 7!

Things move on with the 3D printed diesel loco. A few days ago it looked factory fresh with a shiny coat of paint but that was not going to last for long! 

This loco is destined to be a worked hard and never cleaned piece of rolling stock. So out came the black and brown washes followed by some weathering powders. I also added its fleet number which is lucky 7! Not so lucky for this locos looks but it does add some character and robustness - just like me if you are reading this Mrs. Woody!

I still need to matt varnish it, add glazing and DCC chip the chassis but I could not resist seeing what it looked like on the layout.

I 

 I'm really pleased with that! I certainly had some luck with getting it to this stage though. Remember the abortive, botched orange paint job that I had to strip posted about a few days ago? Maybe all my locos should be numbered Lucky 7!

Couplings.

The 3D printed diesel loco did not come with couplers so that was something I had to address. I needed to emulate something like thee coupling on the black loco in the picture below so out came some scrap plastic card and following some slicing and dicing suitable shaped couplers were crafted. These would be mounted on some plastic rod.

To attach the rod and coupler to the loco I needed to put a mounting on the back of the buffer beam. Again some scrap plastic card came in useful!

With that in place the couplings were mounted.

Just need to paint them now!

Too tall!

Time to find a driver figure for the 3D printed diesel loco. My first choice was a figure I had already painted some time ago and looked right. However mounting him in the cab showed that the roof would have to be left off if he was going to stay! Not ideal!

Luckily I had some more figures in the form of these unpainted ones from Slaters. They actually loo more H0 scale than 00 but that was ideal. A measure confirmed that they would fit and allow the roof to be fitted!

With a bit of painting I have two figures available once cu from the sprue. I have also painted the floor of the interior and the footplate as well as using some highlighting various parts with silver paint. All very subtle but it all goes into making the model that bit better.

Grab it!

Thinking about the loco and my own experiences of getting on and off real locos, there was a need for some grab handles by the cab door. No problem I thought as I grabbed some brass wire. Then I realised I needed to make sure they were all the same size and that any holes I drilled in the loco body were going to be in the right place. Making the handles the right size was easy enough as I bent the wire around a conveniently sized bit of wood. Getting the holes in the right place required a templet. So with a scrap piece of plastic card two holes were drilled that matched the handles. 

Using that against the loco cab, I could drill holes in the right place! A bit of superglue and some choice words as a result of them being fiddly to fit saw the grab handles fitted.

The cab interior built yesterday also got a spray of white and the details just need picking out. The grill also got painted red just to add some variation to the Lemon Yellow! 

I do like the way the grab handles have come out. 

More to do yet but coming along. If I can grab a moment or two in the next few days I might see it finished!

 

How to fill an empty space!

Now Mrs. Woody would like to fill the empty space of my head with more tasks from her list of jobs for me but I think my head is better left an empty space! However, back to the now Lemon Yellow 3D printed loco and it has a largish cab with big windows so I decided that it really needed some form of cab interior to fill that empty space. Nothing too detailed, just the basics of a floor and an operating consul with perhaps a few dials and levers. Out came some plastic card and after a few measurements a floor was created along with the parts for a consul.

Once the consul was glued together.....

...some thin slices of plastic rod were cut and glued to form instrument dials and some lengths of rod were glued into drilled holes to form the brake throttle and direction levers.

With the consul glued to the floor, I formed the all important mechanical brake lever from some more rod.

Still more to do like painting it but already the previously empty cab looks much more interesting.

Lemon yellow!

I made my mind up! I was not going to risk the orange paint again so went for Tamiya's Lemon Yellow. As you can see it went on through the airbrush much better than the orange. The 3D print still has a couple of defects in it but I can live with that and with an eventual matt finish they will be less visible.

Whilst the yellow is a nice colour it does need some contrast so the buffer beams were masked up.

Then Tamiya red was airbrushed on.

With the masking removed, cab roof temporarily on and placed on the chassis it looks all very different and in my view looks good!

There was still some red paint in the airbrush so I got the 3D printed telephone box out.

and gave that a quick blast of paint - nice!

Whose toothbrush????

Following on from the splattered orange paintwork disaster as posted about yesterday, I did try to see if I could sand the paintwork smooth but gave up on that idea after a short while. It just did not work! So Plan B, strip the paint and start again. I have described using Mr Muscle Oven cleaner before when stripping the chrome finish off model parts and it works on paint as well. So out came the aerosol, and it was sprayed. Leaving it for a while to do its job I thought that I needed a brush to get into the various parts of the model and a toothbrush was the answer. Handily Mrs. Woody's tooth brush was about so that came in useful! Hope she doesn't read this!

With the paint removed it was time to reapply some white undercoat.

With the loco body attached to a piece of wood using some masking tape airbrushing could begin.

The finished job!

Next up is the top coat. Do I attempt the orange again or something different?

For those of you worried about Mrs. W's well being toothbrush wise I can reveal that it had been thrown out before I got my hands on it - but she does now have a nice electric tooth brush which would be good at cleaning up model parts!

Splattered!

Just like most people who build models things can go wrong for me, probably more than most other modellers! Take the 3D printed diesel loco for example. I managed to smooth out the print lines and then applied a white under coat through my airbrush for what I hoped would be an eventual orange top coat. The under coat went on well and I left it a day to dry. I also found the Kato Pocketline chassis that the body would be mounted onto. Things were looking good!

However things were going to go down hill! Having mixed up some Vallejo orange paint and thinned it with Tamiya thinners. I loaded up the airbrush and applied what can only be described as a splattered coat of paint that ended up looking more like a pebble dashed finish! 

What went wrong? To be honest I am not sure. Possibly the different brand of paint and thinners did not mix as they might have. Iit was a warm day so that may have been a factor or it may have been operator error! Not sure but I cannot leave the loco looking like this. I can have a go at sanding it down to see if that smooths off the surface but with so many different levels to the moulding that may be difficult. I have a feeling I may need to find a way to strip the paint off and start again. Stay tuned!

3D printed diesel loco

For my 1001 post I have in my usual way picked up another project! This time the 009 3D printed loco body that I picked up at the Market Deeping Model Railway Show last week. Like many 3D prints this required a little fettling to smooth the ridge lines left by the printing process. 

A mix of sanding sticks, wet and dry paper and a scalpel blade slowly created a smooth surface. It took a couple of hours but was worth the effort for a smooth paint job - I hope!