I was checking out putzi's latest adventures. Looks like he needed a loco that wasn't no the market, so he hired a 3d printer to build it for him. http://www.modelrailforum.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=11419&st=225
Mark, weren't you in school studying 3d animation when you first joined trainboard? Beautiful stuff. The crane is awesome. Can you expand some models for other scales as well?
I am officially impressed. How does 3D printing work? I can see a whole new arena for model railroad stuff (buildings, rolling stock, locomotives, vehicles, etc) arising from this, in more than just N scale.
Ya caught me. See below re: other scales. Almost exactly like an inkjet printer. The machine has two nozzles, one for molten acrylic, one for support wax. The print head will then print a cross section .1mm thick. Molten acrylic is printed where the model should exist, support wax is printed wherever a portion of the final product exists in the space above that coordinate. The machine then raises the printer head .1 mm and repeats, layer by layer. The end result is given a bath where the support wax is washed away, revealing only the acrylic structure. As you can see, it's no longer a crude process and can return amazing results. The 4 Stagecoaches, 2 30' Flatcars and the Ventilated Boxcar are all 3d printed models. (Stagecoach on Flat Car inspiration here) These can definitely be printed in other scales, however as the volume of the model goes up, so does the price. An HO scale stagecoach would cost EIGHT times as much as one in N! And conversely a Z scale coach would lack more than half the detail.
