The New 3D Printing Thread

Fantastic! Nice to see the finished product actually works!

Great, it's good to know the track works well, no stuttering or anything so I guess it passes muster

So, that's 2 for 2, the track and the battery cover!

Considering that it was a first-pass print, as it were, it's more than good news.  The joint in the middle is a more-or-less perfect fit, so the four parts fitted together exactly as intended.  I did have to do a fair bit of post-processing and fine-tuning though.

The main problem was that the corrugations on the top surface of the outer rail were printed as random blobbiness:

 

...but these corrugations actually serve no purpose whatsoever, I don't even know what they're doing there on the original model, the blobs can be trimmed and sanded away.

The only corrugations that are important are the ones on the outer surface of the rail. In this draft print they're not very pronounced at all, in some lights they seem to be almost absent, but it seems they're enough for the rubber tyre in the monorail drive to grip onto. I expect that another print using finer settings would be much better.

The white-ish discolouration in the middle of the rail is caused by my trying out the technique of washing with ethyl acetate which is meant to be a solvent for PLA and good for smoothing out any general roughness. All it did was put a white film on the surface. Maybe it was too dilute in the product (nail varnish remover) that I found in my local pharmacist?

I cannot overstate how grateful I am to Nigels for committing his time and resources to this project. Now I just need to negotiate an acceptable price for a couple or three more. We can't expect him to go on doing these things for free!

[Super]

Nice work Dr Chris. Have you tried an over the rail Monorail on this yet?

I haven't got one that works - split gear needs replacing. Maybe this is the impetus I need to source a replacement.

Edit: https://blueplastictracks.com/showthread.php?tid=5342

I've started printing out a recreation of the J-14 block pier and I'm planning on printing about a hundred of them for use on layouts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxITJErhe5o

[Super]

Excellent print Ffar. Wow...a hundred of them...can it be set up where you can print multiples at once on the print deck? It would be neat if the piers could be printed with with a look of block, brick or stone?

Are you going to make caps for the top?

It would be very interesting to see a bit of video of one of them being printed.

Is it printed in three pieces as per https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5390179 ?

What's your rough estimate of the cost of printing one pier?