I always admired these rural utility poles that would pop in and out of the trees along the PA Turnpike somewhere out around Youngwood. They had these amazing big green insulators on them and I always thought they’d look cool on my layout. Recently wanting to try a resin printer, I went and snagged an Elegoo Mars 3 Pro and thought that trying to replicate those insulators in clear green would be a good first project. The insulators have vanished over the years but some quick internet searching led me to finding out that these poles also had many admirers in the insulator collector community. I was able to find out that the insulators were Hemingray Provo No. 0 types and was even able to locate some dimensions.
I doodled up a couple versions of the insulators in Tinkercad and then decided to try making the crossarms after finding scale drawings on Alamy of all places.
My first print was successful after a quick setup of the machine and installation of the slicer software. These were single piece upper and lower crossarms. Please excuse the mock-up and quickie paint job as I was excited to put them together and get some color onto them. I needed to see if I was onto something!
I thought it might be cool if I could print the insulators separately. I was thinking about mounting the insulators to the pins so you could see the pin inside the clear insulator. This time I modified the petticoats to be hollow with a hollow bushing to accept a crossarm pin. First print was a fail as I did them with the petticoats on the platen. I had only one survivor.
On the next print I flipped them over and it seems most survived:
The next experiment will be to print the crossarms and pins in a solid color resin and then install the insulators after I assemble the poles.
