I agree, nice engine house!
All sorts of stuff is happening. after correcting the latest screwup I tested the fixed right wall and it fits very nicely.
I was pleased to see that the walls were dead straight.
Here's another view showing all those buttresses.
I glued the four segments of the roof together using a model airplane technique of placing the parts together, tape them on one side, bend the joint open, apply glue, push it flat and tape the other side. This is how you glue wing skins together.
I'm concerned that this will not be strong enough since the trusses run parallel to the roof and not across the joint. Again, I'm going to use another RC plane technique by reinforcing the joint using graphite tape. The tape is held with thin CA and makes the joint very strong. That being said, I came to another decision to glue all the trusses to the roof itself and not the buttresses. This way, all the trusses and light assemblies will come up with the roof giving me completely clear access to the entire interior. I am absolutely certain that there will be derailments in that building especially when I run into the end-of-track bumper instead of stopping.
I wanted to make the trusses a little stiffer in the lateral direction so I added some balsa strips on the lower longeron. With the trusses on the roof, I can also add some inter-truss X-bracing to prevent tipping. If the trusses were attached to the building, this kind of bracing would completely block interior access.
I finished the outside pilasters on the end wall making doubly sure that I had correctly accounted for any overlap.
Tomorrow, I'll add the inside pilasters.
I ended up with literally dozens of extra pilasters, both long and short versions. I couldn't understand why I asked Stephen to cut so many. Then I went back and studied my SU drawing and realized that I originally wanted them to protrude a scale foot, so I envisioned doubling each 1/8" strip. As it worked out, I didn't do this and found the single depth conveys the bulk of the building successfully, so I now have a full extra set of both kinds of pilasters.
And then… tonight the Amazon delivery man gave me a present. I ordered the 3D printer yesterday and it arrived today. I have a huge list of things this amazing machine is going to do. Remember those hand made telephone pole transformers. Yup! Gonna print them. I've been wanting to scratch-build a diesel prime mover. I've done some drawings of both an in-line Baldwin, and an EMD 567, but really couldn't get my arms around how to scratch-built them. Yup! Gonna print it. These models can also act as masters for resin casting. So do I see a cottage industry in my future… hmmm. This is all in addition to the parts I'm going to produce for the engine house.
I started working on the first machine tool to print. While the 3D model looked terrific, it was a terrible SketchUp drawing. The developer violated all the SU rules. The drawn object must be a "solid" in 3D drawing terms or it won't print. This means all faces and edges must be connected. Otherwise, the printer wouldn't understand where the object began and where it ended. I have software extensions that can analyze the drawing to determine if it's a "solid" and if not, why not. This drawing was a mess.
The biggest failure was the drawing was created as a single object. That is an SU 101 no-no. Instead, after you draw even the most simple rectangle, you should immediately turn it into a group. In SU, any ungrouped object touching any other ungrouped object immediately "glues" to that object. When you attempt to move it, it drags whatever face or edges it's contacting creating some kind of Cubist image. It is impossible to edit such an object, and, as in this case, can't turn it into a sold, and thus it's unprintable.
So I had to de-construct the lathe by highlighting some parts and copy/pasting them to another part of the page. I then broke that apart and re-drew most of the component parts from scratch ensuring that each component was solid in its own right, and then combining them back into a compound object.
The disembowled headstock on the left is what remains of the original drawing. I still have to remove all the controls on it and redraw them too so they will be solids. All the rest of what you see is now printable. I'm basically building a lathe. This took almost three hours. I suspect that a lot of the machines I downloaded will also be drawn improperly.
It only took five minutes to uncrate the printer and set it up to print. Tomorrow we'll see what this baby can do. They've included some test files and I have the drawings that created the appliances and the hoist mechanism too. I'll keep y'all posted.
