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.

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.

Fortunately however, the Customer Service team at Shapeways gave me a coupon for amount of money that I spent on these prints, so that I will be able to order them again. Great service!!
As for the oil bunker, you can see from the pictures in this post that it already received its final layer of paint.

I also started working on the parts for the wholestick cane trucks. The process that I follow is quite simple. I start out by cleaning the printed parts with Acetone, using Q-tips and a brush. This will get rid of any excess support material (wax). I then give the parts a couple of layers of grey primer by Tamiya, as this helps smoothening the surface. Finally I brush on a final layer of Vallejo acrylics or spray a layer of Humbrol acrylics, just using their spray paint in a can.

Oh yes, one final note … as you know, I fell in love with these great narrow gauge Shays, so I started designing another one. It is going to be a 16 ton T-boiler Shay, similar to the one that ran on Laheys’ Canungra Tramway and will use part of the TM-04 chassis made by Tomytec. It’s probably not a good idea , but I just could not help myself …