Peterborough 16mm Society Garden Railway Show
Last weekend we attended our first ever trade show, we met some wonderful people and talked about the kits we’re working on, the process we make things by and the possible kits you’d like us to make. It was wonderful and thank you to everyone who came along. We’ll be back and we’ll hopefully see you at a model railway show soon.
Prototyping parts for the Ruston LA/LB
We shared a few of the early parts with people at the 16mm Garden Rail Show in Peterborough and we wanted to show them to you. We’re finalising the kits at the moment. For the larger scales there will be a “finescale kit”, which these are samples of, and a more rugged cheaper kit which will have less detail but will survive falling off a track in the garden due to a twig on the line.
For smaller scales we’ll just initially do the finescale kits. We hope you like the quality of the prints we’re getting now and hopefully some of you will want to make them soon.
If you’d like to be first in the queue when the kits are released, drop us an email and we’ll let you know.
Helping restore old masters
When we visited Boston Lodge works earlier this year we had the pleasure of scanning and photographing Welsh Pony. Welsh Pony is the sole surviving “Large England” and hasn’t been seen for many years. She’s a fascinating engine and a clear evolution of the class.
She is however missing a few parts and it was with great pleasure that we helped the Festiniog in her restoration in a tiny way. One of their volunteers had created the files for new spectacle plate casting masters for them to 3D print. We helped to check that the files worked and also uploaded them to Shapeways to get an idea of cost and timing for the prints.
The prints were ordered and turned into the masters for sand casting. The machined cast parts have now been put onto a cosmetically restored Welsh Pony for the 150th anniversary celebration of the first England engine delivered to the Festiniog.
We couldn’t be prouder to have played a small part in this. Happy 150th Princess!
by Chris Thorpe
tl;dr As a lifelong model railway person I’ve always wanted kits of specific things I couldn’t find. Now thanks to 3D scanning and 3D printing I can have them, Now that we’re investigating and using crowdsourcing and crowdfunding others can have that experience too with kits they’ve always wanted.
For many years now I’ve been fascinated by trains and model railways. I’m not quite sure where and when it started, but a trawl through boxes in my parents loft the other week yielded my collection of badges of locomotives from the “Great Little Trains of Wales” from the mid-1970s. Some of my earliest holiday memories are of the narrow gauge trains which inhabit the top left corner of Wales.
I made Airfix kits throughout my youth and also I didn’t just buy ready to run models from Hornby, Airfix and Mainline (now Bachmann Branchline), I modified, repainted and improved them, adding brass details and wire handrails. I developed my craft over the years, made mistakes, hopefully improved, many others did the same I’m sure. Plastic was always a material I felt comfortable with and nowadays when I scratch build things it’s always the first material which I choose.
A few years ago Cory Doctorow published a fiction book called Makers. It had a really profound effect on me. That effect was the feeling that we could all become manufacturers of things, that barriers were constantly being lowered. At the time of having this feeling, though, I had no idea what things I wanted to become a manufacturer of.
Last year John Willshire drew a very powerful image which resonated. The text - ‘Make Things People Want’ beats ‘Make People Want Things’ - felt very poignant. The 20th century was a time of making bets on what product to produce, making an enormous number of them and then making people want them through mass media advertising. This current century feels different. Through digital means we can efficiently ask people what they want. Moveover, if we’re open to the possibilities, they can tell us - the end users can suggest the products they want and become the commissioners. After thinking for a while I realised the things I’d always wanted was plastic kits of the trains of Wales I’d loved so much.
Fred Wilson also made a comment which inspired some thinking last year. He said that Kickstarter was a “Futures Market for Products”. Having spent some time looking at Shapeways and other 3D printing bureaux, and looking at domestic printers such as the Makerbot, it felt like you could become a manufacturer of things whilst minimising the conventional risks of being one. Print on demand means not having to hold stock. Only running projects that people want reduces the risk of lost research and development spend and pre-production costs. Kickstarter could clearly be used as a funding mechanism, but also for market research and as a filter of interest - if the campaign didn’t get funded then that told you something, nothing ventured, nothing gained. The risk with this strategy is that people don’t always know what they want until they see it, so we’ll still design the things we want - a blend of crowdsourcing and benign dictatorship.
Last summer we started experimenting. Vijay Paul of DotSan made us a prototype kit of a Dinorwic Quarry Slate Wagon. You can buy the evolution of that kit now along with the sister wagon types in our online shop. I’d always wanted a plastic kit of one. The feeling when I made the first one was amazing. When we sold the first one a day after the shop launched in January it was incredible. When we shipped the first set of orders it felt wonderful and when we got a repeat order it was even more so.
We realised though that some things that you want to model were too complex even for incredibly talented CAD model makers like Vijay to create perfectly just from photographs, or at least that the time taken to produce the model would be too long and the process of checking the model’s fidelity would be too involved and too risky. We looked into 3D scanning and found a firm, Digital Surveys, who normally scan petrochemical plants and oil rigs and who specialise in “as built” surveys.
They worked with us to scan Winifred, a steam locomotive that had just returned from the USA in an almost identical condition to that she left the quarry in Wales in 1965. The survey, 3D model and 3D printed model that ensued showed us that we were on the right track.
A trip to a model show in November where I would normally have spent a fair amount on kits, which would almost be consolation prizes for the kits I’d really wanted, showed me something interesting; once you can commission and can make the things you really want you don’t want suboptimal things quite so much or at all. It was at this point that I realised we should open up the process that we were going through for other people. Between Christmas and New Year, when we planned to launch Flexiscale, we built a site where people could propose new kit projects and could cast votes of support. In two months over 70 users have proposed over 20 kits and have cast hundreds of votes and the pace is picking up. Niches are where passions lay.
It was clear by mid-late January that one proposal was gathering a lot more support than the others so we decided to take it further. We approached the Festiniog Railway in Wales whose engines were the subject of the proposal. We asked them if we could laser scan them, they agreed and actually then got very firmly behind the campaign. We had a small window of opportunity in which the four locomotives would be in the same place and at the same time to be scanned, Digital Surveys were booked again, they’d managed to hire the new hotness of 3D scanners - the Surphaser - and travel plans were made to scan the locomotives in the early part of February.
We launched the Kickstarter campaign on the first day of scanning the locomotives, by the time we returned from Wales we’d raised about a third of the money.
The locomotives are wonderful and important, the oldest one of the four, Princess, is 150 years old this year and is the oldest surviving narrow gauge locomotive in the world. The Festiniog and that locomotive are the origin of the small industrial railways of the world which enabled efficiency in mining, road building and almost every part of the industrial revolution. The slate quarries served by narrow gauge railways in Wales such as the Festiniog literally put a roof on the buildings of the industrial revolution.
The data is now in for the four locomotives and we’re starting the work of modelling from it. At the unveiling of Princess at Paddington Station on yesterday we gave the invited VIPs and guests copies of a newspaper printed by Newspaper Club about the project. The Kickstarter project is over 100% funded and we feel heartened that at least for this first case our theory is proven.
People have said what they want, backed it with their time and money and we’re going to make it in return. We’re becoming a micro/mini manufacturer and a platform for “kits as a service”. Everyone touts the advantage of 3D printing for creating unique and customised objects. For us and for model makers it’s about creating the niche objects and at a wide variety of scales - the economy of scale is in the creation of the 3D file once and reusing it for a variety of scales, something impossible with physical tooling.
We’re preparing our next round of Kickstarter projects. We spoke to the keepers of the locomotives on Friday and they very happily gave their permission. The users of the service are creating new project proposals almost every other day at the moment. We hope this is the beginning of something big and yet small. More importantly it’s made up of the needs and desires of a community who will, over time, all get the lovely feeling I had last year, when for the first time I held in my hands something I’d wanted for a long while.
p.s. this data is too precious to lock it up, so we’re working on opening up the original data and the CAD files of individual parts with other manufacturers (of wheels and parts) and railway societies who are keeping the real things going!
We made a newspaper with the lovely people at Newspaper Club to give away at the unveiling of Princess at Paddington
Our first product: The Dinorwic Quarry Slate Wagon (FLX000001).
We chose this prototype to be our first kit for several reasons:
Firstly, it’s a well loved and well known prototype.
Also it’s a very good test of what is possible with 3D printing and what is different about the technique. It would be impossible to cast the top rails and bobbins as a complete section in injection moulding or white metal casting. It’s a good test for some of the more complicated kits we’re working on.
Finally, there are many of the prototypes around to measure, photograph and understand. We’d like to thank the Welsh Slate Museum and Julian Birley for help and advice in preparing the kit.
The kit is simple to make, with either four or eight axelboxes to fit to the base (depending on whether single or double flanged wheelsets are fitted, and then the top section is added on as a single piece. The grain of the wooden planks can be easily simulated by scoring and treating the plastic material.
Morning. It’s been an amazing week.
First of all many thanks to the staff of the Ffestiniog Railway and the people of Boston Lodge for making us so welcome. It was an honour and a schoolboy’s dream come true to be there and be welcomed so well. We had a wonderful time showing off the model of Winifred, the scanning equipment and a few more things. Hopefully it’s the beginning of a beautiful friendship. More things are already being thought about and plotted.
Thanks also to Digital Surveys who did a fabulous job as ever. The Surphaser worked well and they’re now working on the data. We were lucky with the weather and were able to scan Palmerston and Welsh Pony outside which made it easier to get around the engines and thanks must go to Henry for braving the February cold to do the scanning.
Finally thanks to all who have supported the Kickstarter campaign. As I’m typing we’re nearly 60% funded in under 5 days. It’s incredible. We’ve also had some really great conversations with people as part of the Kickstarter process and we’ve just put some of the suggested rewards up on the project. Some people have asked about whether they can buy a set of four body kits so that’s now available. There are also 3 more unique engines now that the first one has been sold and we know which engine that person would like. Do check them out, they may have been just what you were waiting for.
We can’t wait to get working on making the kits now. So exciting.
A rather late Day 2 photo report. Sorry. We’ve been a tiny bit busy.
Yesterday was quite amazing. It was the culmination of a lot of work, a lot of hope and a lot of goodwill. We launched our Kickstarter project for making kits of the Ffestiniog’s four George England locomotives. Within 24 hours we’re nearing 20% funding. It’s amazing and incredibly exciting and thank you to everyone who has pledged so far.
We were also scanning and photographing at Boston Lodge. Thanks so much to the Ffestiniog Railway who have totally got behind the project and given it their support. Everyone was so welcoming and it was a real privilege and joy to be there.
We were lucky with the weather and managed to get Palmerston and Welsh Pony scanned outside. We scanned Prince indoors and we’re off to scan Princess on Day 2. Princess looks incredible. The restoration and paint job are just stunning and I can’t wait to see her in Paddington Station in March.
Onwards. Hoping to get all the scanning done before the snow arrives and then the fun begins of turning the scan data into kits for the enthusiasts who’ve told us they want them. If you’re keen to get a kit, now’s the time to pre-order through pledging on Kickstarter.
Prince and Princess at Boston Lodge. Day 1 of photographing and scanning.
