Rows of cane

Posted on by

Based on the picture in my previous post, I placed some questions about the planting, growing and harvesting of cane. Below you can find the answer of one of the members of the Australian Narrow Gauge Yahoo group … it’s a great story to read and a very helpful guide for sugar cane newbies like me …

cane train

The Farmal M tractor indicates that the scene is set in the ’50s which is when I grew up on a cane farm outside Mackay. Cane growing was a complex and very regulated business but I will keep this brief.

Cane was planted between March and June depending on the wet season that year. In our area the wet season started the last week in January. However no-one, except maybe Lennox Walker, knew if it would last a day, a week, a month, or 5 months.

Continue reading →

New design

Status

Unfortunately I had to abandon the 3-column theme that I used for the Koala Creek blog for more than a year. Due to the latest update to the WordPress back-end, the old theme was not working correctly any more, so I had to start working on a new one … and this is what I came up with. Hope you guys like it …

Growing Cane

Posted on by

With regards to railway modelling, summers always tend to be a bit slow … so it’s a good time to browse the web a bit. During one of my searches, I bumped into some great pictures of modelled sugar cane on a Japanese site . It took all my language skills …or better to say, the automatic translation option of Google Chrome to find the the owners of the Japanese layout.

HO scale cane

It is called the Hawaiian Pacific R.R. and I dropped them a note to find out what material they had used to model the HO scale sugar cane. I was very surprised hear that it is artificial grass … and of course it was only available in Japan itself, so I contacted the company that sells the stuff. Unfortunately they didn’t ship outside of Japan, forcing me to find another way to get it shipped home.

Continue reading →

A quick update …

Posted on by

Just a quick update on my 3D-printing adventures … as mentioned, I ordered some additional parts from Shapeways. These were the parts for the 13 ton Shay that I previously ordered from printapart.com, as I wanted to see if they could meet that same level of quality. Unfortunately I hit a small bump in the road here. Most parts printed fine, except for the cabin of the Shay.

Oil burner side view

I ordered four of them from Shapeways and somehow the wall thickness turned out thinner than it should be. According to the 3D model, the wall thickness should be exactly 0.75 mm. Amongst the four printed copies of the Shay cabin, the wall thickness varies between 0.35 mm and 0.70 mm. I am not quite sure if this problem was caused by an issue during the upload of the STL-file or if it was an error with the printing process itself.

Continue reading →

It finally arrived!

Posted on by

As already mentioned in my previous post, Shapeways is now offering a new material called Frosted Ultra Detail … or better known as FUD in the Shapeways community. According to the specs sheet, FUD offers the same detailing possibilities as the material that was used by printapart.com. As a test, I placed a FUD order about a month ago …

shapeways order 01

Due to the overwhelming success of FUD, they unfortunately could not make the promised 10 working days for delivery … but what the hack, it finally arrived today! As you can see all parts arrived nicely packed in separate bags and the quality of the details are superb. The material itself has an icy look to it and is probably the reason why they call it Frosted. As for the parts that I have ordered, I believe that they came out very well.

Continue reading →