Garden Railway Forum

This is my first attempt to produced a resin printed loco for my planed 8mm scale L gauge (Lego) garden line. 8mm scale might be a bit unusual, but it's what Standard Gauge works out to for the Lego track. I'm normally a NG modeler, but any larger scale won't easily fit on my resin printer. I'm basically intending to make everything myself as I'm retired and can't afford to buy much. Because of this, the fact that no one else uses this scale is irrelevant.

It has no prototype, but looks sort of Bagnall-ish . It's a modification of a loco I did in OO scale to fit a Black Anna chassis, which in turn is a modification of an 009 loco I did before, which in turn is a copy of an 009 pugbash I made about 1970 when these were all the rage.

It will be powered by one of the Chinese copies of the Lego power block and it's associated radio control. Mainly because I'm a cheapskate, specifically a broke cheapskate. This will have 3D printed wheels and motion

tebee wrote: Tue Apr 29, 2025 5:28 pm This is my first attempt to produced a resin printed loco....

This will have 3D printed wheels and motion

Difficult to see the detail, but it looks pretty good for a first attempt.

This is part way through my latest project and it has printed wheels and motion. The wheels are actually in filament, but everything else is in resin.
The reason for filament wheels is that I'm not sure that resin would have enough resilience and could shatter.

Yes, the light was bad when I took that photo, was trying to show the size of it compered with the OO gauge track. I've also not yet cleaned up any of the support tails still hanging off the body.

I'm going to try resin printing the wheels, the current resin I'm using (Elegoo ABS-like v3)seems a little bit flexible straight out of the bottle, I'll see how it goes and maybe have to swap back to filament if it all falls apart.

From one broke cheapskate to another, it looks like a well-proportioned model. I'm interested to see what it will look like with a motor inside it. Will you be using Lego track (or similar) in the garden?

For anyone else who was wondering, 8mm/ft is about 1:38, or around 10% (12.5%?) bigger than 1:43 O scale, give or take.

That body looks remarkably good, especially for a first attempt.
As a fellow cheapskate, I salute you
Looking forward to seeing how things develop.

Rik

Never mind, I just saw the answer about the clone track in your other thread.

Nice to see some LEGO on here, although I did a simple calculation of what LEGO scale is albeit if a little too accurate = 7.96460176992mm to the foot

Also TrixBrix makes good 3D printed LEGO track, so you don't have to cope with LEGO's tendency to not be useful outdoors under UV rays https://trixbrix.eu/?currency=GBP

tommygander1941 wrote: Fri May 02, 2025 10:17 pm Also TrixBrix makes good 3D printed LEGO track, so you don't have to cope with LEGO's tendency to not be useful outdoors under UV rays https://trixbrix.eu/?currency=GBP

Wow, some incredibly complex pointwork there.

Rik

drewzero1 wrote: Wed Apr 30, 2025 1:18 am From one broke cheapskate to another

You called?

As an aside, regarding the scale and gauge; I find there's a lot of pleasure to forging one's own path, and an awful lot of value to creating something truly unique.

Old Man Aaron wrote: Sun Jun 08, 2025 3:27 pm

As an aside, regarding the scale and gauge; I find there's a lot of pleasure to forging one's own path, and an awful lot of value to creating something truly unique.

It's also nice to have something that's different to everybody else's railway !

Anyway I've changed my plans somewhat. My Narrow gauge friends have persuaded me that I shouldn't return to the dark side, in this case standard gauge modelling. Its been pointed out to me that the smaller industrial locos in 16mm scale are not that much bigger than SG locos in 8mm scale and would still fit on my printer.
Also shorter trains in NG would mean less wagons to build and the ultra sharp Lego curves would look better as a NG line. My original SG idea was to do a modern take on pre-war tinplate toy trains, but by going NG could move at least one step nearer to realism.