Thanks guys. Al, I may be asking you for help and/or advice in the battleship turret project. I need to make six cylindrical (or slightly tapered) drums representing the outer walls of the interior levels and the exterior armored barbette of the turret stack. In SketchUp I'm able to take a shape and unwrap it and flatten it. If makes figuring out what the actual shape of the conical cylinder is without the drudgery of doing an old sheet metal layout project (which I used to know how to do and have long forgotten).
I got all the windows into the P&PRR HQ building, got the ceiling of the first floor installed with its lighting and am about to put in the base plate and roof plate. I've drilled all three pieces of Masonite with a 1/2" drill to accept a piece of ABS tubing of that size to act as a wire chase to bring all the lighting to the "basement". I'm also going to build the bill board and light it.
Here's the upside down view of the building with that ceiling in place.
I took a few minutes and drew a commercial HVAC unit and a roof stair exit to add some interest to the roof. With the drawing experience I'm getting with the turret project, this one literally took just a few minutes. I was able to download an installation document for a Daikin unit and use the drawings and dimensions within to draw the HVAC.
Since this building is far in the background, (10 feet away) I didn't go crazy in detailing the AC unit. For example: I didn't attempt to detail the fans.
I printed them yesterday, but didn't get them off the machine yet. The hole in the stair enclosure is a drain hole. I used the "Hollow" feature along with "Drill Holes". On a massive print like this one, you can either open up the bottom and hollow it out that way, or you can have the slicer program actually form a hollow inside. You need to have a way to let out the liquid resin that was not hardened in the print process, thus you need a drain hole at the part's lowest point and an air inlet hole at the upper part. What you see is the drain hole. I don't use this feature very often, but for both of these I used the programmatic method to do it.
I forgot to add some structural parts under the condensers on this side of the part. I will add them old-school with some styrene angle.
I'm also going to try and print the entire bill board frame as a single part with the new printer's enlarged capacity. So far… the new machine has been flawless.
Turret update:
My gun spacing is wrong! A fellow forum follower sent me some actual measurements. The real gun center-to-center spacing is 10'-2", mine came out as 9'-5". This error was causing me problems in getting the doors on the back bulkhead to line up properly, and, more importantly, my guns weren't lining up precisely with the kit's plastic gun house part. It took four hours to make the drawing changes, and get them ready for re-print. I wastes some resin, but at least I have the capability to make the fixes myself.
It's a shame because the rangefinder/floor print really came out pretty good. The optical tips on the rangefinder are just placed there. They won't be permanently attached until the gun house is built. The 6.88" (1:1 scale) change affected the main gun girder foundation, the back bulkhead door spacing and the spacing of the rammers on the officer's compartment floor. That meant redesigning the floor itself and fixing some more troubles it had, and I don't think the floor is right yet. There's another access aisle on the right side that I don't know where it goes.
And here's how much debris is created when to extricate the big rangefinder print from the forest of supports. It took almost an hour to cut it away and clean up the print. Even though the machine puts all the details in, you still have to trim it all up without wrecking anything.
Lastly, the metal gun barrels arrived yesterday which was a surprise. I thought it was going to take much longer. I was then able to accurately measure the diameter of the joint end of the barrel and modify the big gun slide assembly to perfectly match it.
It's going to be sweet when those guns are built even if I don't have the rest complete yet. I don't know of anyone whose created and accurate 1:72 scale 16" gun in its entirety. Lots of army field pieces, but not of a big naval gun like this.
