West Edge 3D

West Edge 3D’s owners Moss and Lindsay wish all our customers and friends a happy and holy Christmas, and a peaceful and prosperous New Year. We’re a family business, and will start our annual holidays on Christmas Day for 3 weeks. We’ll be back on Tuesday January 16 to look after any orders received over that period.

No, not a huge number of molars for a dentist somewhere!
This is the first test print in large numbers of our little blocks of HO scale sheep, designed to perfectly slip into the Ixion Model Railways Ltd VR LF bogie sheep wagon through the doors. This is 120 parts, enough for 5 wagons at 24 per wagon. Since we pressed ‘Go’ on this print, we found we could fit six wagons’ worth on the print tray - 144 tiny ‘blocks’ - as the screenshot shows.

Some still photos of the cars in the previous post.

Some recent prints. The four tiny Morris 1100s are headed to Worcestershire in England!

Megan, a local artist, has been scanned in both an exhibition costume she has created, and also in every day clothes as a memento. Her partner is wearing traditional German carpenter’s clothes. Colour scans and prints make very personal Christmas presents!

One of our local Newcastle customers is an ex-police officer. He purchased white HQ Holden and XY Ford Falcon sedans and with the application of NSW Police decals and roof lights, hey presto! Two HO scale General Duties cars ready for the layout.

Our friend Gernoth in Germany continues to have great success with ‘3D Scanner’ app for iPhone. Printed in colour, these three figures make a nice little mini-scene. Shown here in 1:43 and 1:87 scales.

Modelling Our Memories.
In 1977 I was 18, and my first car was George, a 1963 Morris 850 (the first Mini). 60 years after it was built and 46 years after that photo, I’m 64 and my 1:87 mini-me looks at that photo on his phone and smiles at the memory.

All those 1:87 HO scale HQ Holdens are now printed, and looking good.

Our current print tray is all 1:87 HO Scale HQ Holdens - 22 of them!
Sedans, utes, wagons, panel vans and GTS 4-door Monaros. Looks like the Holden Factory carpark in 1971.

One of our favourite customers is Sandy, a local Newcastle artist. A while ago we scanned her in a postmodern Bo Peep costume, and at her exhibition last weekend the figurines were a big hit. So we’ve printed 16 more, and it’s a bit of a freakout to see them all in a gang together on the desktop at our HQ. Especially if you knock one over and all but two hit the deck and they’re like so many little dead bodies… 😀

Our modern firefighter figures printed at 1:32 scale. Amazing detail!

Here’s a link to an interesting article on how PepsiCo USA used a Stratasys J55 like ours to make full-colour prototypes of its new 2 litre bottles, as well as printing the manufacturing tooling for them at a 90% cost saving.

cdn-au.mailsnd.com

This is the iPhone app mentioned in our recent video of the humans scanned in Germany.

A customer in Germany has been experimenting with iPhone 3D scanning in order to produce his own custom scale figures that we print for him. These were made with the TRNIO and ‘3D Scanner’ apps, and at these sizes (1:87 and 1:43.5) are looking good. Why not download an app and try it for yourself on people or favourite objects?

The latest issue of the Australian Model Railway Magazine has a review of our N scale cars. Thanks AMRM team for the write-up!

Packaging our N scale cars for our friends at Frontline Hobbies in Newcastle. They’ll be on the shelves there soon!

Some of our recent projects:
1. Our colour 3D-printed sheep filling a Victorian Railways LF a bogie sheep wagon, coming soon from Ixion Model Railways Ltd.

2. NSW railway station signs designed by Ray Pilgrim which have been selling well via our website.

3. A small selection of our N scale cars, printed since we swapped out the clear resin in the printer for solid black. As you can see, the windows and windscreen come out solid black, and other sections of the car are denser and better defined than when the black is created from a mixture of yellow, cyan and magenta. Our human figures look generally denser too; it’s a shame we can’t have both clear and black available at the same time.

One of the things we love most about our scanned and colour printed scale figures is how authentically they capture the forms and variations of real people. Mass-produced painted plastic figures just can’t do this.

Chapter 3 of our experiments with adding our colour 3D-printed sheep to the forthcoming Ixion Model Railways Ltd Victorian Railways LF bogie sheep wagon.
Colour polyjet 3D printing resin isn’t cheap, and we’ve been looking at how to make them more affordable. The latest variation was to take out the middle sheep in the ‘block’ to leave 2.5 at either end. The first two photos show the blocks needed for just half a wagon! There are 3 blocks per compartment (the wagon has 8 compartments) and two complete 8-sheep blocks are included to be placed at the end of the wagon (top and bottom) so the end view is authentic. Putting them in is fiddly, but only took me a few minutes.

Photos are included of the open-door side of the wagon where they are fitted (the doors will be in the box and are just glued in place), and the other side which comes with the doors already fitted. An end view shows how the full blocks look.

This arrangement seems to work well visually, and is 20% cheaper than using only full blocks. I’m feeling pretty positive about this project.

While we have the black resin in our printer (in place of the clear - see previous post) we took the opportunity to print a small selection of our N Scale Aussie car range to see if black improved any definition. Previously, any black in the models was created by combining the cyan, magenta and yellow resins, each of which is actually a transparent colour - only the black and white are opaque in the materials available for the J55.

Result? The tyres are blacker, and black striping is denser, but it also produces some ‘bleed’ where the black is visible through thin surfaces, like on the front of the bonnet and the rear ‘C’ pillars of the HQ Holden GTS Monaro. And of course the the interior of the car - designed to be embedded in clear - vanishes in the solid black!

Curiously, in my opinion, the previous tyres were perhaps more convincing, as pure black tyres don’t exist on real cars - they weather to shades of dark grey almost immediately after being fitted and driven on. Look outside and check this for yourselves. (Note at the same time that tarred roads aren’t black either unless newly laid, for the same reason; but that’s a whole other conversation.)
The last photo shows the ‘clear resin’ cars in front, with the black ones behind for comparison purposes. Do please remember: these are TINY models and the photos are cruel enlargements.

On Friday we decided to do the first ever material change on our Stratasys J55 colour printer, switching out clear resin for black resin to find out if we’d see a difference. We printed these G scale (1:22.5) figurines using the new mix of cyan/magenta/yellow/black/white [plus the water-soluble support material]. We were flabbergasted to find that the changeover used up 581 grams of resin (costing $436.00) just to empty the lines of the clear and replace it with black. A couple of the photos show where all that resin went. (Into the bin after the photos, is the real answer.) The colour change is obviously not one we can afford to do often!
Nevertheless, we love the the new prints, which have excellent definition in the faces especially. No clear material in the printer means we can’t print any of more of our little cars at the moment, so we need to rip into printing up a stock of our current figures before we switch out the black for the clear again.

Another new figure set in preparation. This one’s a set of workers in Hi-vis. Spotto the guy holding a pineapple.. you know, as you do when you’re at work.

Our experiments with creating colour-printed sheep for the Ixion Model Railways Ltd HO scale LF wagon continue. Lots of trial and error has been involved, as you can see!

Test printing ’blocks’ of sheep to suit the 1:87 HO scale model of the Victorian Railways (Australia) LF bogie sheep wagon, coming soon from Ixion Model Railways Ltd. The sheep are coloured to represent animals that are dusty from living in dry paddocks, and the base is dark red so it ‘disappears’ visually inside the wagon.
The doorway they have to fit through is tight, so the blocks are pushed in, then slid down the compartment to fill it. Three narrow blocks make the compartment look more crowded that two wider blocks - see the photos.
There are eight compartments per wagon, and the doors for one side are supplied separately so this loading operation can be carried out. If the purchaser wants to run the wagon empty, they can just glue the doors on without fitting any woolly passengers.

These photos show some custom 1:22.5 (G scale) prints of figures from our most recently added sets. The detail in these scans is startling: check out the gloves hanging from some of the miners’ belts, for example. Click on each picture to see each one in all its glory. Posed with O scale and HO scale steam locomotives from Ixion Model Railways Ltd.