O9 Scale 7mm/ft Ravenglass Railway Coach

My railway coach design arrived today - I'm very happy with it! It feels stronger than I thought it would be, given that all walls were slimmed down to the minimum 1mm in most places. I can't see it needing much sanding before painting either, if any.

The proprietary bogies snap into the sockets perfectly, so my "back of an envelope" calculations for the socket size worked out fine. Rolls around curved track like a dream.

Also the couplings look much better than I thought they would look. See the comparison shot with the coin sizes.

Attached photos include a slightly smaller 16 seat white metal and brass coach, whereas this Shapeways one is 20 seat.

Thanks Shapeways! Hopefully the first of many designs based on Ravenglass & Eskdale rolling stock and locos.

Very Nice!

Love the detailed material, judging from the couplings, you had no issues with small detail.

looks great!

be aware,, the material you use will shrink down a bit when being in the sun,, or warm area's!

thats the shame about that material,, not really good for modeltrains
(WSF is better but less details )

Thanks, Reece, Jettuh -

Thanks for the tip about the material. Looking at the sample pack I got, I agree I don't think WSF is smooth enough for model trains yet sadly, so maybe I need to look into learning about resin molding from the Detail material, if that's possible.

Or just email my CAD files to someone in China and get them to make an injection mould in the Hornby factory :laughing:

All good fun experimenting.

Ravenforth, that's wonderful stuff.

How long have you been 3D modeling for?

Thanks Ana, I signed up for an account ages ago but never got going with any designs for more than a year. Work / life getting in the way really.

I started trying to learn some 3D packages this Christmas 2010, found Blender totally baffling and Alibre not much better, although I thought I might buy Alibre eventually.

I never gave Google Sketchup a proper try out first time round, dismissing it as too basic. I have to say though, the more I work with it and deal with the little workarounds, the more I think I won't need anything other than Sketchup for my largely rectilinear projects (it's no good for weird and wonderful curved shapes though). The coach was designed totally in Sketchup (apart from overall model scaling), starting with a blank file on January 10th and was ready for final upload last Sunday 23rd. I just watched loads of videos on Youtube to get going.

I might write up some bullet point "Top Tips" for working with Sketchup at these small scales, that I've found out the hard way over the last few weeks.

Good luck with your projects!

Good for you, finally diving in. Please do write up some tips on Sketch Up! It'd be highly valuable to me and some of the other 3D modeling noobs here.

Btw, are you already familiar with Beginning Google Sketch Up for 3D Printing by Sandeep Singh?

https://apress.com/book/view/9781430233619

There's a whole beginning section where he encourages readers to use Shapeways, and walks us through the process on the SW website. Might be useful.

I have found sketchup great so far, for wierd and wonderful curves have a look at some of the plugins avaible,

In particular some of the ones on http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=323&t=16 909 are particulary good

I meant to look up that book a while back Ana, but plain forgot about it. Thanks for the reminder - I've downloaded the sample chapters on my Kindle now and it does look like a useful book. I do wish all technical books came with a ring binding, so you could lay them flat. Just a thought.

Thanks jmrben, that's a very useful link for us Sketchuppers!

Brilliant stuff Jamie. Have you gotten any painted yet? I am curious to see how they look after a light airbrushing.

Did you follow the drawings in the 7mm Association booklet?

Cheers,

Chris

Hi,
Never really had a problem with shrinkage... but then again, I never really keep my models standing in the sun or in very warm places. For me FUD works great for model trains!

Cheers,

Jeroen

Thanks lads, they aren't painted yet and the coach has suffered a bit of warping since the pictures were taken, Hopefully it's not terminal and they can be straightened up with some brass L sections glued underneath the length of the coach.

The FUD material appears to have better thermal resistance figures, so fingers crossed for less warping. Only time will tell. I'm just about to order my next design.

Yes Chris, I've been using the 7mm Association drawings as a rough guide, although they don't feature this particular coach design. I've been using Eliot Andersen's wonderful photo website of Ravenglass to size up the coaches.

Nice work!

The book mentioned above by Sandeep Singh is very useful, I've learnt a lot from it and it does make things clearer than learning online. There's even some functionality in Sketchup that I wasn't aware of, such as the ability to scan in a picture and trace over it - could be useful for modelling railway buildings that have long gone....

Regards

Richard.

I have used WD for model railways, N scale in fact, which is much smaller than the model above, and despite leaving them in the sun all day and in a freezing cold car I haven't noticed any shrinkage or expansion.

Your print came out nicely!

Regards,

Jack