3d Models Available

And if any of you out in blog-reader land are curious about what a 3d model is like, you've now got a chance. I've put some of the 3d designs for things I've been describing here up on the Thingiverse web site. In addition to that 1920's strip mall I built a couple years back, there's now a 3d model for the CS-35 36 foot flat car and for the drying flats.

Each model also has the SketchUp file, so you can modify the design to your heart's content.

Have fun with the models, and let me know if you make anything interesting based on these designs!

SP Concrete Telephone Booths: The Results

I decided against redoing the design of the telephone booths - the existing models were quite good enough for my layout. Even the ones where the individual flat faces were visible weren't that bad. And, thanks to 3d printing, I've also got around 15 telephone booths finished and painted when I only needed... oh, maybe two. So, no work on a better door, no improvements to hinges. But I've got finished models. One's already in at the far end of the Glenwood siding and looks great!

SP modelers, expect me to be handing out phone booths as party favors for the next couple months.

I'm Un-Friending Burrito Justice

Normally, I'm a big fan of Burrito Justice, a San Francisco blogger who spends equal time talking about burritos, fog, Sutro Tower, Mission District happenings, and San Francisco history. His posts on the SP's route through the Mission are definitely worth a read. But then his big-city parochialism appears. In the latest article on the stringing of the first telegraph line from San Francisco to San Jose, he makes the sarcastic comment:

Another way of looking at it — the people of San Francisco were so isolated they actually got excited about talking to people IN SAN JOSE. I mean, that’s pretty isolated.

I could make a smart-ass comment about that's just the sort of comment you'd get from folks who live in fog and don't eat enough prunes, but that would just be sinking to his level.

3d Printing: Not for the Claustrophobic

When I was a kid, I loved exploring - climbing the big cypress near our house and finding paths to the top, or figuring out ways to reach the roof of our house. I even crawled under our house a couple times, and only once because my dad needed help getting the TV antenna wire under the house. That kind of fun stuff isn't just for kids. I remember when my aunt first started using a computer, she was playing a 3d game and managed to get into a place that was *just outside* the virtual world. Suddenly, she was seeing the back side of all the scenery and models, and could see how the scenery is constructed.

I'm getting to do that crawling around and exploring with 3d modeling too. SketchUp, my favorite tool for 3d modeling, started as an architectural sketching tool. Although it can do three-dee models, one weakness is that it doesn't always make perfect models suitable for printing. Most 3d printers expect the model to be watertight: no holes in the faces making up the model, or gaps between faces. Most 3d printers also expect that there's no hidden faces embedded inside the model. These two requirements are needed so the various algorithms for figuring out the 3d shape can figure out what counts as inside the model, and what counts as outside. One of the simplest ways to determine inside/outside is to draw a line through the model, and count the walls you encounter. If you find an odd number, then your end point is inside the model; even, and you're outside. Extra faces and holes mean the software loses track of the model shape, and you end up with a model with either odd faces, or even odder parts missing. SketchUp doesn't enforce either of those rules, and while there's software to check and fix models for you, it's a pain to have to use the external tools to do a sanity check after each bit of creative drawing.

That means my three-d modeling habit involves a lot of what I did as a kid: crawling around in strange places looking for signs of extra faces that should have been deleted. The picture at the top shows the 3d model of the telephone booth model in SketchUp. I've deleted the faces making up the bottom surface of the model, but you can see the outer wall, the hollow inner surface (light gray), as well as all the inner surfaces marking the limits of where the printing material goes (in light blue). On the left is the reverse image of the doorway; the four cylinders sticking out are actually the ventilation holes on the right side of the model. Although the original model only took about 90 minutes to draw, probably half that time was trying to fix faces that were either on the hollow inside, or were incorrect faces on the inside of the model.

So if you ask me what 3d printing means to me, it means an awful lot of crawling around in confined spaces. Good thing I'm not claustrophobic.

SP Concrete Telephone Booths

Here's the result of that laser light show - a lot of Southern Pacific concrete telephone booths. These were placed out at the ends of sidings out in the boonies, and gave the crews a way to contact the dispatcher in the days before radio.

These are great models for 3d printing - they're small, geometrically simple, annoying to scratch build, and rare enough so they're unlikely to be at the hobby shop. (To be fair, there are two manufacturers making the more modern versions of these, so I'm exaggerating a bit... but you get the idea - little, railroad specific details like this are perfect for 3d printing.) I'm not even the first one printing these; someone's selling 3d-printed N scale models on the Shapeways site. Building the 3d model in SketchUp took probably an hour and a half, and I was looking at finished models later that evening. There are even plans and drawings available in the Common Standard Plans books.

3d printing really comes into its own when you need a bunch of these. As the video showed, printing twelve of these wasn't a stretch. The first run had one obvious problem - SketchUp, because it's intended for architectural models, draws curves surfaces as a set of flat facets. By default, it uses 24 faces for a cylinder, or six faces for a 90 degree turn. On the first models, I could see the pattern on the model. Redoing the model with 48 faces/cylinder appears to make surface look perfectly curved. (Hint: when drawing a circle, type "48s" in the text box at the bottom of the window to change a circle to 48 sides.) Even with that problem, the models came out awfully nice, with the doors crisp, and some added coarse detail for hinges, latch, and handle all being visible under the magnifying glass. The models did get the characteristic vent holes in the door, though it's hard to see on the model. Although the upper panel in the door looks solid, it's glass in the real model. Rather than create an opening, I'm planning to paint the panel gloss black to look like glass.

And so now I've got something like 24 telephone booths, when I need maybe four on my layout.

I printed these telephone booths upside down. Because I print the model hollow, printing it from the bottom up would have trapped resin in the body; printing upside down gives the resin a chance to escape. The photo shows the support structure added by the 3d printer to handle the uneven surface; I cut off the support with diagonal cutters and finish with an x-acto knife and file.

Even though I've got twenty-four phone booths, they're not quite right. The second version got rid of the stair-step pattern and made the door more obvious, having it stick out two inches instead of one for better definition. Looking at real photos also shows some problems. This photo, for example, shows strap hinges. It's also obvious that the door's set back into the concrete cylinder. That little detail would be worth adding, but doing so would add the challenge of trying to highlight the separation between the door and the frame. That's the sort of decision that folks worry about in mass-production: what do you need to do to make the detail stand out, or make it easy to paint the model, or make it easy to build? (Think of the exaggerated detail of hood doors on diesel locomotives.) While setting the door and frame into the cylinder is realistic, I'd need to add a line between door and frame that'll need to be out of scale.

I also have to figure out how to finish them appropriately. I'm suspecting I'll be giving these out as party favors for a while, so figuring out to mass-paint a bunch of these would be a big win. I'm out of my normal concrete-gray spray can, so I'll show some painted models after my next trip to the hobby shop. I'm also starting to run out of my favorite Polly-S colors now that Testors stopped making the railroad colors, so I suspect I'll be in the market for new railroad paints soon.

Coming soon: the 3d flat cars are still going; I've tweaked the designs a couple times to match photos, and I've painted and decaled one. Because I had very few spare sets of decals with 1930's weights and dimensions, that decaling was painfully fiddly. Because I know I'm going to print at least 6 or 7 flatcars, I'm hoping to custom-print decals to make the job go faster. More news later...

Movie Night XX: Better Living With Lasers

You've all probably seen my stories about projects being made with the new 3d printer, but here's some photos of it in action. My Form One is printing cylindrical concrete telephone booths. The real Southern Pacific Railroad put the full-sized ones along the railroad tracks in rural locations. (Real booth in the Sacramento Valley.) In the days before radio, they gave crews a way to talk with the dispatcher.

The clear resin and multiple cylinders make this print job a bit closer to fireworks than most of my prints!

Packing Houses in Edenvale, and Random Photos on Facebook

When I started researching the local San Jose packing houses in detail, I saw a couple mentions of a plant south of San Jose in the Edenvale area. It's a surprising neighborhood for any kind of industry - just prune trees for miles around, with the Hayes mansion sitting in the middle of it all. There's also little detail in the old newspapers or history books. (Just check out what little I found about the Edenvale Fruit Company on the Packing Houses of the Santa Clara Valley wiki. Supposedly, it was financed by the Hayes, and built of brick. Ed Richmond bought the business around 1918 just after he quit J.K. Armsby and went off on his own. A year later, when he teamed up with Elmer Chase to form Richmond Chase, the Edenvale plant was one of their star properties.

But I've never seen a photo of the packing house, nor have I seen anything other than the occasional cryptic reference to it. Kids remember it as one of the few sights along Monterey Highway in those days, and it was memorable enough to deserve a mention in a San Jose airport timeline: "1952: ...Fire destroyed the landmark Richmond-Chase Co. dried fruit plant at Edenvale, and Campbell became an incorporated city."

Well, history's trying to tease me. The picture above was posted to a Southern Pacific history group on Facebook, and *almost* shows the packing house. The photo is supposed to be a shot of Johan Hagemeyer, a local photographer who was best known for his portraits. For some reason, he was out in Edenvale one day. The photo shows the main line, the tiny whistle-stop station, and a line of boxcars along the siding. The shadows hint that the photo was taken in the morning, with Monterey Highway to our right.

And Hagemeyer is there, leaning against a loading dock for what will become Richmond Chase Plant #1. And the photographer couldn't take the time to turn just a bit to the left and capture the packing house itself.

And, as always, getting extra pairs of eyes looking at these photos helps us figure out history. Throw in comments if you see anything interesting in the photo, or go to the Packing Houses of Santa Clara County, and throw in the details you know about our town and our canneries.

Johan Hagemeyer's photo comes from his collection at the Bancroft Library; the library classifies it as part of his early photos, and probably taken between 1908 and 1915. The Johan Hagemeyer Photograph Collection is available at the Online Archive of California. Great thanks to Dale Phelps for posting this on the Southern Pacific Railroad page on Facebook, where I saw it.