It finally arrived!

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

Long Time Comin’

For those of you who have been waiting for an update on my HOn30 Shay … this one has been a long time comin’. I have not been spending much time on it, because I am building a diorama of the Dutch Inlet Canning Company. I however also had issues with my 3D-printing service. First of all they increased the material cost and secondly they increased the shipping cost.

shapeways

You can imagine that sending over test parts for fitting purposes, became a bit too expensive. Fortunately Shapeways, a well known 3D-printing service introduced a new high detail material just before Easter. They named this material Frosted Ultra Detail and the specs come very close to the material that was used by the old printing service. So I started designing parts for the Shay again … and will make them available online in the near future. 

The Dutch Inlet Canning Co.

Man, I just noticed that my last post was over three months ago … way too long. So what have I been up to since the end of November last year? As mentioned last time, I decided to enter the diorama contest of Eurospoor 2011. I finalised the design of the layout (which you can find at the end of this post) and finished my first Craftsman kit.

dm053

The Moose Air Lines cabin is based on the Dill’s Market by American Model Builders Inc.. I changed the paint scheme and have replace the standard roofing with corrugated metal roofing made by Rusty Stumps Scale Models. It’s great stuff that I will surely use for the structures on the Koala Creek layout.
I’ve now started working on the first building of the cannery , which will be based on the  Whalen Apiaries kit van Fos Scale Models.

Continue reading

Without words …

I always try to focus on one project at a time, unfortunately I can not help myself to start thinking about the next one already …
My converted Shays will of course run on the tramway itself. I will however also need some engines for the Sugar Mill itself, so I started looking for information about the Fowlers that were operated by the Moreton Central Sugar Mill in Nambour.

Coolum at the Moreton Mill yard

That’s when I ran in to Peter Bruce’s Railfan Blog, with some great pictures of the daily operations at the Moreton Mill in 1962.
One of the pictures on his blog has the out of service Shay in the background … and Bruce even promises to show more pictures of the Shay in his next post … I am looking forward to that one!
I have added smaller versions of the pictures at the end of this post, just click on the link below to see them. The original and larger pictures can be found on Bruce’s Blog.

Continue reading

It’s all for free!

Please note that I have removed the download pages for the mentioned parts, as they were hardly being used.

As part of my modelling efforts for Koala Creek, I have created several HOn30 parts. These parts have been modelled in 3D CAD software and have been exported to STL file format, allowing them to be printed by a 3D-printing service like Printapart.com. The great thing about this way of modelling is that once the STL file has been created, one would be able to print an infinite amount of copies of a part.

3D printed wholestick trucks 3

I however do not believe that I will be needing that many parts for Koala Creek … nor do I have any intention of selling the parts commercially. So I decided to share my modelling efforts, by making the STL files of the parts available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

Continue reading