![Image](https://www.gracesguide.co.uk/images/2/21/Im1930v149-p5c.jpg)
When I saw Mike Pinder's drawings for this loco in May 2019's 16mm today, I thought this it would make a nice quick build, a couple weekends worth of work. 5 weeks later and it's still not done...
I recently got a finer 0.25mm nozzle for my 3D printer, and wanted to see what kind of detail it could achieve. I built a prototype chassis, with an extended motor shaft driving a worm on the opposite axle, like the underside photo of loco in the article. A printed clip on assembly held the worm to the spur gear and gave the appearance of the gearbox from the underside.
This didn't work. There was too much friction for the little 130 size motor, so I went for a traditional setup, but still with two motors.
The motors are the type with the flats on each side, so to try and make them look round extra printed bits were added, also used to mount the motors.
I found a photo of one of the later versions in use, and printed a driver in a similar pose.
![Image](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/02/af/47/02af475597889255a01942ad631cc486.jpg)
The driver model was generated in a program called Makehuman, loaded into Blender to pose the limbs, and then exported to an .stl for printing. This was my first time doing this - came out OK for a first go, its pretty useful to be able to generate figures in custom poses.
The lights have red/white bicolor LEDs, with the diffuser printed in clear PETG.
In the back box there is a power switch and removable LiPo battery, and in the front box there is a horrific mess of wires, but an NRF24 based RC system does just about fit.
The 0.25mm nozzle did reproduce a lot of detail, which basically comes for free as it is just copy and pasted in the CAD program, but the defects from it being printed are still obvious. No effort was made to sand the surfaces smooth, the prints were very quickly blasted with a hot air gun to get rid of any hairs of plastic, then painted. The NRF24 RC system seems to work OK, no issues with range have been noticed so far.
Still need to build a proper boxed transmitter for the RC, also plan on etching some brass nameplates for this and other locos.