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…..........--- 105 Ft. N Scale Plate Girder Bridge --- Pt. 1 ---
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Print files for the bridge and abutments ( HERE).
You can find all the files to 3D print this object and others on my thingiverse.com account ( HERE ).
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Used a rasp to flatten and …..
….knock the shoulders down on the roadbed I had laid down. Then spent a couple minutes after that with an 80 grit sanding block. Finished up putting down spackling. I really like the nice flat surface you end up with doing this. Makes the track go down really nice. Also fills any voids between the cork strips and larger ones where the cork is cut for turnouts. You don't need to be quite as accurate with the cork there. Also fills the seam at the bottom of the cork where it is glued to the foam board. Knocks off all those cork edges, loose cork and high spots that can be a problem when laying the track. All in all well worth the 45 minutes it took to do the above.
Next I got side-tracked from the scenery in the mesa area. I needed another plate girder bridge on the upper level on the side of the layout where I've been working on the scenery.
I thought I could do this fairly quickly as I had a shorter bridge already designed when I was designing plated girder bridge sections for the other side of the layout for a high bridge there. I had designed a bridge that was 10 N scale feet high but a little shorter than what I needed here. Didn't take to long to make that one longer.
Pretty much maxed out what I could print with the Photon M3 resin printer. Got this on sale for a little over $200 and love how it has been printing. I've only been using Siraya Tech Build Sonic Gray resin so far and love it also. It is tough, somewhat flexible on thin parts and I can print detail down to right around one N scale inch with it.
Adjusting the bridge length went quickly and the print was about a 9 hour print. Then things slowed down as I needed abutments to hold the bridge up. I had made some a while back for my double track girder bridge (more info and print file links HERE ) but ….
I got off to a bad start on designing these and spent most of a day on....
….. the design above and was going to pint that the next day but woke up at 2 am and laid there a couple hours and realized I wasn't going about it in the right way.
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Got up at 6 and made new templates (shown above) and....
…. used the template and the bridge to make a new drawing. I'll now take the drawing and go back into Fusion 360 and try again. Shouldn't take much time after learning a few new tricks in yesterdays effort.
I printed both abutments in one print but the bottom one failed on one side. Doesn't happen often but can happen. I usually don't add any supports to what Chitubox puts in automatically but before printing that abutment again I did add more supports to that side. It is easy and fast to add or delete supports. Click on where you want one and Chitubox does the rest. The next one printed fine.
On a 64 ft. girder bridge I designed and printed with the Ender 3 Pro filament printer I printed the bridge shoes separate. This time I took those and combined them with the new abutments and they printed fine and are right where they are needed.
Later I'll paint the bridge and abutments and then glue them together and put them in place as a unit.
Earlier I had designed the different plate girder spans shown above along with one that has 10 foot side plates that was 80 feet long which I didn't use. I took that one and extended it to 104 feet for this one. I'm not sure how tall a real bridge's side plates are for a double track bridge that is 100 feet long. I'm going to research this more and maybe change it to a bridge with 8 foot side plates. Appreciate if anyone can point me to some info on that.
Those openings in the walkway are a N scale 2” x 4 “ and the metal that makes up the grate is just a tad over 1 scale inch. That is all really small in N Scale. From the side of the layout you can't really see that the grating is open but still fun to print it and see what the printer can do.
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I'll leave this at this stage and come back to it later as I need to keep working on the landscape near the coal mine.
Print files for the bridge and abutments ( HERE).
You can find all the files to 3D print this object and others on my thingiverse.com account ( HERE ).
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Thought I'd share this...
…. Dottie and I drove 50 miles south onto the Navajo Nation (reservation) to visit an area that I use to go to when I still had the Purple Sage Trading Post open. I bought Navajo folk art from the people there. It was toys that the Navajo would make for their kids out of mud and wood to play with since there wasn't money to go to town and buy toys. Later they made it and found they could sell it to the trading posts in the area which would then sell it to tourists. After going down a few times they started driving to the store to sell to me so the trips pretty much stopped going into the back country there (Sweetwater). I've driven near the Sweetwater area and can see the main mesa there from the house but hadn't driven back into there for a lot of years. The trip was down memory lane and one of the many views was of the tall ridge shown above. Would like to model that formation but it would take some time.
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Print files for the bridge and abutments ( HERE).
You can find all the files to 3D print this object and others on my thingiverse.com account ( HERE ).
A link to this whole build ( HERE ).
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