Westlake Publishing Forums

Thanks Chris.  I will check these extensions out.  They sound most useful.  And no, I am not using a Mac.

Stuart

The whole tower already looks pretty good dirty. -- Russ

Frithjof and everyone else, to satisfy your curiosity, here is a brief update. First the good news: the display on the rivet punching machine has been replaced and is now working correctly again. But then I couldn't do anything in the workshop for two weeks due to illness. However, I used this time to prepare the next assembly, the main girders, for production. This meant marking the rivets in all the drawings, preparing the raw material order, creating drawings for the laser cutting, etc.

I had to solder four more trusses together for the rear tower.




Then I was able to fit the side panels and the curved top panels.




Next, I have to sand the whole tower clean, then I can mount the various platforms.

Bernhard

Overwhelming. I'm glad you're still modeling and sharing your progress with us. -- Russ

G'day Stuart,
A bit late to this but assuming you are still having issues I can add my 5 cents worth.

I use the free version of Sketchup 2017 to produce architectural models, and Blender for road vehicles.

Sketchup has two free extensions that can be downloaded from either the Sketchup extension warehouse or the  SketchUcation site  which I have found invaluable when using it to produce 3D printer files.

The first is "Solid Inspector 2" which will locate and highlight issues and allow you to automatically fix the ones that it can manage to itself, such as reversed faces, detached edges and so on  . Other issues like holes in the mesh are highlighted so you can locate them and fix them manually.

  There is a related extension(who's name escapes me right now) by the same author (Thom Thom) which is tailored specifically to fix common problems that Solid Inspector can't , but I prefer to fix them myself to ensure the file doesnt end up with strange unexpected features due to the extension possibly re-interpreting it strangely.

The other extension that might be useful to you is "OBJexporter". This allows you to export your model as an .obj file which every slicer package should be able to handle. This extension does a good job in maintaining the scale of the file, some others I've tried just produce a file that is tiny in scale or overly large, which must be rescaled in the slicer.

As an extra step to ensure the file is good before importing into the slicer , I import it into the built-in windows application 3Dbuilder, which also does a good job of finding any issues. If you have a Mac, I guess this option isnt open to you...

Hope this helps.

Wow, what a lot of complicated little details!

Some of the CAD stuff:

Seems it's been a while. I have been slowly plugging away at the tractor portion of my locomotive. Got some paint on it, it's a mix of Vallejo acrylics applied with an airbrush. Grease and oil with the usual oil paints mixed with fine powdered dirt and/or pigments. I recently got back to it and finished the ignition magneto and its control rods. A mix of 3D printed parts and some simple fabricating. I have almost finished all of the CAD, save the seat and the gas tank end with the lettering. There are a lot of details on this thing.   

Sami, and if I was googling right, you must be rather well on foot to reach this mountain pass over narrow gravel paths   

Even without paint it already looks really cool!