I like the tiny gear teeth on the main gun carriages - are they for elevation control?
Yup! There are pinion gears behind the curved shield that engage with the elevation sector. In 1:1, the guns are tied together through that myriad of linkage so the two pinions move in unison. I’m unable to do this with the model, so I will be permanently set at 0 angle.
Some eye candy showing where the project is right now.
I’ve learned how to add V-Ray textures to the drawings and am now thinking about removing Podium from my SU installation or at least deactivating it. V-ray is superior in every respect.
I got good drawings from Ryan showing accurate floor plans for the Upper Handling Room and the Magazine. With this I can finish the design phase.
Also, received good news from my wife’s pathology report from her double mastectomy. We are relieved.
Things are quiet on the homefront. Due to the nature of my wife’s cancer, even though the pathology was clear, will undergo a short cycle of Chemotherapy. All of this will be over in mid-March and we’ll be happy when it’s done.
During her recovery I didn’t work in the shop much, but I did a ton of drawing and got a lot of printing done. This is an example of one load with lots of odds and ends for gun house details. This pile includes shaped junction pieces to help me glue the roof plates at the correct angles and those really neat “tractor seats” for the trainer and pointer positions. I had found a bar stool with the correctly shaped seat on the SketchUp 3D Warehouse and then modified it to print and conform to the ship’s seat size and shape.
Here’s a closer look at the seats. There’s one more that’s printing now. It’s the bicycle-shaped seat for the sight setter position. It’s in the pile above, but, the bottom mounting flange was a separately grouped drawing that I neglected to combine with the overall model. When I conveted to the STL and then the printer, that flange wasn’t there so the seat pole was just dangling in open space.
This is the pointer seat:
And this is trainer seat. Both are REALLY delicate, but well cured and formed.
The assembly process has officially begun. I glued the gun house base plate to the underframe. Styrene to UV rensin? Only with CA or epoxy. UV resin is impervious to most common plastic solvent.
The print package was the flooring pieces. Ryan sent me photos of all the floor plates in the gun house and I was able to reproduce them with reasonable fidelity. I was struggling with the diamond plate. I had downloaded a piece of this from the 3D Warehouse. The artist didn’t group the pattern separate from the substrate so when I attempted to trim or enlarge the sample to fit my various piece shapes, I had to deal with the substrate disappearing, reversing faces, or just being a pain in the butt. Finally, I decided to separate the diamond patterns and group them. This allowed me to shape the substrate, which is quite easy, and then drop the diamonds onto the surface. Since they are their own group, I was able to erase them in one tenth the time it was taking before.
I designed he little box steps at the rear hatch openings to assemble with the curved angle brackets.
Here’s where they fit nesltled into the rear curved wall.
I assembled the floor pieces on the frame for fit and understnading the assembly process.
With the base plate in I’m able to test fit and locate all the gun house details starting with the elevation and training pump systems. The training pump was easy since it just has to nestle up against the piping I printed that come out of the b-end hydraulic motor. I marked the base, but when this is painted, those will disappear so I’ll probably go back and make some punch marks.
I then test fit the small, diamond-plated flooring pieces.
I did the same for the pointer’s side. This was a bit more complicated since the spacing is fixed by the very small floor piece that spans between the pointer regulator, where it sits on a built-in ledge, and the a-end of the pump system. I had to add a small piece of angle to support the aft end of the floor.
The angle:
And the floor piece. It was very hard to see just how this little bit of floor was attached in the real thing. Ryan’s photos only show it from above and all the drawings don’t detail it sufficiently. I had to fake it.
There are hydraulic lines eminating from the a-end of the pump which I will probably add old-school with solder wire.
The entire mechanism assembly needed some possible positioning on the gun mounts. i chose to use 0.022" phos-bronze wire. I broke way too many carbide drills doing this.
It took some trial and error to get the pin holes in the two pieces so they’d line up. I then drilled and pinned the mounting for the fuze setting regulator. This simple job almost went completely south. I kept breaking the 0.03 2" drills doing this simple operation. I ended up having to drill three diffferent holes to get one without a piece of broken carbide in it.
Fitted, but not glued. This will be glued after the gun trunnion cap is installed on that side.
I drew and printed the sight checker’s telescope. This station is only used during trainining exercises to evaluate the trainer and pointer proficiency. I made a lug on the mounting point that serves as a trunnion pin on that side. This solved a problem for me.
While there’s a just a couple of details left to do for the gun house, I’m starting on the upper handling room. I first tried to fit the entire wall structure as a single part, but as you can see, the setup on the printer was not ideal. Way too many supports for my liking.
I have a friend with a bigger printer and talked to him about it, but I don’t have his printer model available on my slicer. So I went to plan B. Separte the four wall maintaining the nice curved corners. It’s those corners that dissuaded me from doing it out of styrene sheet. This permits me to leave on wall open if that’s the way I want to approch the cutaway. I did this same scheme when producing the little n-gauge buildings for the exhibition layout. They’re printing now and will finish in a couple of hours. Notice, no supports on cosmetic surfaces. Just the way I like it.
Happy to report that the print came out perfect, including the replacement bicycle seat assembly. It’s in the ultrasonice cleaner now, and I’ll finish them up tomorrow.
Wonderfully complicated! 
Yes. It most certainly is.
The wall print was very good. I broke some of the door dog levers, but that’s expected. They’re very delicate and I will replace with wire. The walls fit together as designed.
I put together a punch list for the upper works and it has 19 items on it. So there’s still a lot of work to be done here before turning my attention to the lower decks and main magazine. I almost have all the reference photos I need to finish this. I have just a couple more requrests for Ryan concerning the communications gear on the gun house rear wall, and the geometry of the cartridge chutes.
The sight setter’s seat came out better than expected. The support post is delicate, but the new 3.1 second printer settings are producing small details that have some strength. I post-cured these last two batches BEFORE cutting off the supports to impart more strength to withstand the support removal. It worked well.
This little bit of floor has to key into the flanking gun mounts. I needed to find out if I could install it after the sighting system part was installed. Luckily, it could be.
This was the test.
I now had another decision facing me. Do I paint the sight system before installation or after. I put it together now. It required a lot of pushing and shoving to get it all aligned during the tests, and I even broke one of the cross-rods. This led me to believe that I would really mess up the paint job in the process. I bit the bullet and permanently glued it in now and will wrestle with the painting going forward. What I can’t reach with paint won’t be visible anyway—or so I’m assuming.
For some reason—probably some warpage—the trainer’s regulator console didn’t sit down on the frame. Rather than continue to force it, I made a shim. Again, no one will notice this when painted and enclosed in the gun shield.
Right now I’m about designing the cartridge chutes. I have good orthographic line drawings, but they don’t show the contours. I don’t believe these sheet metal contrivances are rectangular in cross-section. I’ll do the best I can, and then, after New Years, ask Ryan for some pictures of its true shape.
This is that punch list to which I referred:
Everyone have a safe and happy New Year and I’ll see all y’all in 2024!
Hope everyone’s New Years exceeded expectations.
I think I broke SketchIUp. I’m trying to cut out the center of a large array of components that were grouped. When I say large, I mean an array of 13 X 12 powder canisters used to hold the brass cartridges for storage. I don’t want print and entire stack of 100s of cans. Instead I want just their ends to be printed with large square open space in the middle to save resin. But… using BoolTools2 crashed SU and using “Intersect Faces” sat with the whirling beachball of death for over a half hour and then crashed SU. I had almost all other aps turned off. I’m thinking that I will have to rethink the whole exercise and create the ends separately and then stack them against the inner box. Just the reverse of what I wanted to do.
5IP Projectiles~.skp (1.7 MB)
This is what needs to be replicated for the model. Any ideas?
simplify.
things like the rivets and the handle are way too detailed compared to the rest. and when merging all the tubes, it makes SU crash.
I mean, the simple stack you’re showing is 4,2M lines and 2M faces.
how big (real scale) are you going to print it ?
I just deleted the handles, just to see, and it dropped to 1,8M lines and 0,8M faces. and I’m not entirely sure that when printed to scale you can actually see the missing handles (it might be worth testing)
also, your have nested instances, groups containing groups containing components containing groups.
Not 100% sure but the 4 levels might not be helping.
Here is a simplified solid version of your shell casing (there were some stray edges and a weird inside face)
try this one.skp (996.7 KB)
second advice, don’t try to merge all 168 at a time. maybe merge a pair of stacks, then the next pair, then… and so on. computers tent to prefer 10 medium operations to a massive one.
Thank you! I occasionally (regularly) fall into the trap of over-detailing parts that are going to print at 1:48. The printer can resolve almost anything, but quickly the details become so small that you need magnification to see it. Furthermore, there is a physical limit where the printed resin simply can’t hold together. All of my drawings are printable regardless of the detail level, but that doesn’t mean it’s right. If I am going to simulate the handles, I will have to meld it with the lid. That’s the way these kinds of details are molded in injection-molded styrene kits.
I will simplify as per your example, and I realized that you won’t see any of the real of this array. NOTHING! All I have to show is the front. I’m going to cut them down to be just the noses and tails plus some fully detailed ones for the top row and the ends. I’ve already separated out the ends by making each UNIQUE, deleting them out of the group and pasting place on the outside of the group. It will take a little time to finish this up, but I need a few of them so it’s worth it.
I think you could make the handles from a four-sided circle and couldn’t tell the difference from yours at this scale…
Also the rivets are rediculously detailed. A good indicator is the “blackness” when viewed from some distance. So many lines that have to be displayed that it appears almost solid black. A 6-sided circle pulled up a little bit would tell the same story to the viewer…
I took some of the suggestions. I removed the bails from all the middle tanks, but left them on the ends just for fun. I also did the intersect faces to one grouped row at a time and put a rectangular hollowed shape to fill all the middle spaces. That was for the large array. There was a smaller array that I also put in a filler, but just made it solid. I just pulled a huge print off the machine including all the ammunition racks for the Upper Handling Room (UHR). With the 3.1 second exposure, it seems that everything I want to print, prints, and prints perfectly. Moreover, all the tiny features have strength that I didn’t think was possible. Case in point. Get a load of the Gun Captain’s fold down platform. The side supports are really fine, but strong.
This post is going to have a lot of varied stuff.
I drew this part so the back frame was curved to conform to the curved rear wall and this worked nicely.
I drew and printed the massive support girder ring that holds up the massive weight of the entire rotating structure. There are form legs that support the ring and take the load into the ship’s structure. The walls of the UHR doesn’t actually support the gun house. I chose to draw and print the ring and legs integral with the UHR roof and the armored ring that surrounds the actual base. This includes the weather seal ring at the top. This was I was ensured that the ring would be centered with the rest of the structure.
Here’s the drawing:
And here are several shots showing it in a test assembly.
I’m thinking that instead of cutting away some of the structure, I’m just going to leave the front wall off.
While many of these parts were in various stages of printing, cleaning and post-curing, I was getting to work on the gun house shield. I thought I was being smart by pre-installing the angle edges that would provide more gluing surface. Unfortunately, my first go was wrong. This was it.
It was wrong because the upper surfaces go inside the edges of the right and left walls. However, I had them flush to the edge, not leaving the single material thickness needed for the proper joint. Happily, the ABS angle pieces, don’t weld well to styrene with normal styrene liquid cement and I was able to pop them off. The bottom edge angles DO glue flush to the bottom edge.
Instead of fussing with the spacing I just glued them on the roof pieces flush with their edges, which, in this cae, was the correct way to do it.
I had printed some angle pieces to hold the roof pieces at the proper angles. I also finally cut the front gun shields. These were tricky piece! There was no way to really understand their shape and how they interact with the rest of the inner structure. I made them a little longer than needed with the thought that I’d make field mods. And that’s exactly what I did.
This is when I glued them to the front two angled sheets. They serve as a weather seal around the rotating gun shield and they help me join the angle pieces together. After installation the first piece I trial fit it to the gun house and found that it needed a lot of trimming. I was using liquid cement, but found it was causing the styrene to fracture. I switched to good old standby, Testor’s tube cement.
I’ve shown this in other threads, but it bears repeating. I cut circles in styrene with a specially modified machinst’s dividers. I sharpen on point to a chisel edge that’s parallel with the circular path. I can then scribe perfect circles that can be snap cut. I find it easier to spin the part and hold the dividers stationary since I can keep it at a uniform cutting angle.
This closeup shows the chisel edge.
Another detail that needed work… I found that when the access doors are opened, they are swung all the way open. I had originally shaped the hinges for a 90º opening. And I wanted to have the screw holes empty and have a inner edge of the hole. I used some thin styrene sheet with 0.020" holes drilled in the matching pattern. The illusion is a good one. I’ve printed new doors with the hinges fully folded and no bolts.
The outside joint needed some filling and sanding. This was nice, normal, old-school model building job.
I drew and printed the last details for the gun house; the cartridge discharge chutes, and the cam brackets that sit at the back of the gun pan. With these parts everything in the gun house is printed and ready for paint and assembly.
The next up was the ammo racks that line the rear wall of the UHR. After trying different methods including those offered by readers, I was able to draw and print the 80 cartridge and 20 cartridge arrays for the powder tanks, and the projectile rack. In each case there is a big chunk of plain resin so the printer didn’t have to cope with all the intersections therein.
This is what all of this looked like in the slicer. I was confident that it would all print successfully.
It did print perfectly. In the cleaner now.
Lastly, I fit the ceiling beams into the now-constructed from glacis plates. It needed a scosh of trimming to fit. I didn’t allow for the over-scale thickness of the gun seals.
Here’re all the racks for the UHR. I print doubles of everything, I only need one of each type, but experience tells me that all kinds of things can happen before the model is finished.
Tomorrow’s Saturday, so no work in the shop on the weekends. So all have a nice weekend. Don’t do anything stupid shoveling snow, it you’re in an area where it going to hit and I’ll see y’all on Monday.
Short session, but productive. The circuit panels that line the side wall of the Upper Handling Room were fun to draw and even more fun to see how nice the prints came out. The printer has been effectively flawless. Even the FEP with the new Elegoo formulation has been working for months. It’s very forgiving. If there’s anything sticking to it, you pop it off and you’re back in business. I used to be happy to get a couple of weeks without wrecking the film. Now I go so long I forget when I last did it.
Here’s a view of the actual wall in the Upper Handling Room. The projectile dredger hoist upper is in the view. As you can see, I can’t model it becuase I have no information about the lower parts of it.
As you can also see, part of the view is obscured by the open projectile dredge hoist lid. There’s a lot of cabling coming out of the tops of the panels. I may or may not add that with wire during the build. It will be hard to see.
Here’s my interpretation of the wall.
And here is the printed part. First sitting on the blank wall, and then sitting with the ring frame support separating the two parts.
It ain’t perfect, but it supports the illusion. I had absolutely no definable dimensions on any of this equipment, so it’s all and educated guess.
I glued in the angle brace for the lower front to glacis plate joint.
I then glued the front plate to the rest of the shield assembly. I also added some more angle brackets to support future assembly. All these resin to styrene joints are with thin/med CA with accelerator applied first.
The resultant joint needs filler and will be done later.
Lastly, I finished drilling out the open bolt holes on the now-open acress panel. I bought a whole bunch of 0.022" caribde drills from Drill Bills Unlimited. In this case I bought a shorter length and re-sharpened to save some money. I don’t know what it is, but I was breaking them light crazy. I used four drills opening up these tiny holes. At a $1.50 each, this adds up to real money pretty fast for just one part.
Tomorrow my wife goes through the first of four chemotherapy sessions. She’ll have one every three weeks ending in mid-March, so I may or may not be in the shop tomorrow. She’s supposed to be done at 1:30 and I’m going to stay with her the entire time. I’m bringing my laptop so more design work could still get done. I can’t do much more with the UHR until Ryan gets me the dredger hoist images I need.
I’ve been getting more quality drawing time since I’m not in the shop. I helping my wife recover from her first chemo session. I know why people don’t look favorably towards chemo. It beats the heck out of you!
With Ryans new images, I was finally able to draw the access door correctly. It boggles my and Ryan’s mind that there are so many types and sizes of doors on the ship. I originally assumed that the handling room access door was the same as the access door to the gun house and drew it that way. I was wrong. As you can see it has 6 dogs, not three. It’s also tapered for explosion resistant like that of the armored pilot house, although that one is 18" thick!
The inside flange has brass cams that bind against the dogs sealing the door. I’m going to model this door open. I’m going to get some of the new Real Metal Foil gold foil to simulate any brass surfaces in this model with real reflective metal.
Drawing the upper handling room hoist structures took over a day and half. I originally had it a bit too long. Ryan came through with 18 images of the hoists (upper and lower), even including a tape measure in many of the shots. It was difficult reading some of the numbers, but I was able to muddle through. There aren’t many square angles. There are lots of fillets, curve edges, things lying at weird angles and mechanisms that needed to engage with one another. SketchUp is not particularly happy working with shapes such as these.
I drew it so the lid can be printed open or closed. I was thinking of displaying each unit in one of two configurations, but this woud prevent me from having either a projectile or powder tank peeking out of the top. I’ll print enough so I can make a field decision.
Here’s a nice rendering showing the color scheme. Any surface that can be in direct contact with either projectiles or powder cannisters is made of brass to eliminate spark hazards.
Here are the two hoists in place in the handling room.
I’m going to print this tomorrow or Thursday. The lower hoist is significantly more complicated than this one. It is the power section so there’s lots of hydraulics, piping and odds and ends besides the actual hoist mechanisms.
This is what I’m talking about…
I am also going to reprint some other parts needed for the magazines, especially the scuttle doors. These were printed with the old settings and aren’t up to the quality I’m now getting. I’m going to review all the previously printed parts and reprint any that compromise the quality I’m trying to hit.
Yeah. I have now passed two sessions. I wish you all the best.
It’s beating the hell out of her! She contracted a urinary tract infection which is directly the result of chemo reduction of the immune system. Her blood counts have been okay, but she’s totally wiped out with weakness, lightheadedness, and just general feeling awful. This is only to garner another 3% of 10-year survivability over the surgerical intervention. We’re thinking seriously about not going forward with additional treatments. The cure seems worse than the illness. She has no active cancers anywhere. The adjuvant treatment is just to catch rouge cells from causing trouble.
I’ve been drawing away and did some 3D printing. I printed the upper hoists while I’m still working with Ryan on getting as much detail as possible about the lower ones and their enigmatic hoist trunks. I printed open hatches, and another attempt at the one cicuit panel wall. The first one had some annoying drawing/printing errors that I didn’t need to keep. Lastly, I printed a new door wall with the tapered opening and improved locking pads. This one came out 1/16" shorter than the other wall. I don’t know why, unless the entire handling room height changed in one of my iterations of the shape. I’ll reprint a correct one. I felt that was a more elegant solution than grafting on a 1/16" strip.
As before, the printer is working like dynamite. Whateve I want, no matter how tiny, it’s reprouducing. This is how I’m putting them on the machine. I have all their rafts touching so the entire group pops off the Wham-Bam sprint plate as a single part. Makes it easier to clean and fish the parts out of the alcohol baths. I then put the who deal under the post-cure lights and then trim and finish.
Notice how thin the fine support connectors are. They look like they shouldn’t work, but they do and they’re small enough to not damage tiny details during their removal. As fine as the supports are, they aren’t breaking during the print. They break when I want to remove them. Before I recalibrating, I was losing the small supports all the time.
In this view you can see how smooth the walls are. I’m printing at 0.04mm layer height and it shows no layer lines. It’s what many non-3D printing folks worry about with this technology.
Here are the cleaned, but not perfectly… hoists. The powder hoist is in the open position with a powder cartridge ready to be removed and the projectile hoist is in the closed position. You can actually make out the tiny screw clampos that hold down the lid when stowed.
here’s a vignette with the projectile hoist in relation to the circuit box wall.
Lastly, here are the new doors. The big one is for the handling room and the little one is the cartridge chute, one of which I’m going to pose open. The hinge attachment points are very fragile and I’m trying to visualize how to attach (and when).
One of my dear friends and astoundingly amazing model builders, Chris Bowling, explained how to spray paint outside in colder weather by heating the rattle can paint in a bowl of hot water for about 5 - 10 minutes to warm it. It works well. I may have to resort to this since all these parts need priming before color coats and it’s been too cold outside to do it. I don’t paint solvent-based paints in the shop and don’t (yet) have a spray booth. I’m vascilating between wanting to splurg on a 40w solid-state laser cutter or a decent spray booth. Actually, you need positive venting of the laser cutter since they produce some bad fumes too.
I’m sorry to hear about these frightening times. I wish you and your family the best.
Best wishes for you both too!
Thank you both! Today’s she’s having a pretty good day, but the hair is starting to leave. Well… at least it means that the chemo is working.
I drew another little detail. This is the manual sight sitting on the gun house roof that’s used by the gun captain occasionally. It’s really old-school, using some wheels and metal cables to transmitt the optical position selected by the captain to manual readouts next to the trainer’s and pointer’s stations. It would be the sight of last resort if all the power was out. It’s a very fragile assembly so I had to beef it up a lot so it would hold together as a printed part. Ideally, it would be nice to do it in photo-etch, but I don’t have that capability, and don’t want it due to the nature of the chemistry you need.
To increase the odds that it will hold together I chose to print this, along with the captain’s hood with the rear gun house roof piece. I had originally made the roof out of styrene, but didn’t like how the hatch hole came out so re-doing was in order anyway. It’s printing now and will be done in about an hour.
I don’t think I’ll be daft enough to actually attempt to wire up the mechanism in the gun house ceiling. It would be hard to view and even harder to build.
I’ll display this print tomorrow.
Here’s how it turned out.
It’s slightly oversized in my estimation, but at least a person can make out all of the geometry. The roof is not glued to the back…. it’s just sitting there for the picture. Printing the parts directly from the drawing that created them helps insure that the fit is essentially… perfect.
I still had a error in the hood assembly that I forgot to correct. The lower clevis on the counter-balance cylinder wasn’t actually integral with the cylinder and when the support was removed it just fell off. Some careful drilling with a 0.022" carbide drill and wire of the same diameter fixed the problem permanently.
I also gave up on trying to open up the cartridge hatch on the drawing… causing way too much agita. I just cut it out old-school. My cut went a little wide, but was fixed with some Bondic. Bondic, being the same chemistry as the UV, makes a permanent and strong bond with the resin. It sands the same, and when painted, is invisible. To hold the little door hinges to the wall I will also pin them. This time with something even finer (0.012")
All these added doors will be very easy to break off during handling. I’m still fretting over just when to install them.
Always amazed by the detail you’re achieving 
It amazes me constantly!
Here’s some more eye candy. I’ve got the two lower hoists almost finalized. Still waiting on a couple more images from Ryan to get some of the piping detail more accurate. Right now a lot of it is my imagination running wild. Getting the angles of departure for the ammo trunks that go up to the the Upper Handling Room was difficult and could be wrong. I took the angle directly from the pictures taken by Ryan of the sides of the more vertical one. The tilted one, is more of a guess. I’ve asked Ryan for a direct side shot of both sides so I could confirm the angularity and the piping details.
I think they’re too tall. Ryan measured them at 6 feet or so, but with the base I made it seems to high.
These units with all their detailed glory with sit on the port side wall of the magazine and have their backs to the viewing public in the way that I’ve envisioned the display. Ryan I are discusing how else to display it so both front and back details will be viewable. One possibility is having the back as a mirror. Another would be displaying it where all sides can be viewed. To be decided.
Next up are the hydraulic pumps on steel stands which are much more pedestrian that these things were… and… they’re both the same. Only diffirence is where they lie vis a vis that hoist themselves.