Last Christmas I picked up a 3D printer. After watching way too many YouTube videos about 3D printers, I went with the Ender 3 v2. It is reliable yet inexpensive. The printing resolution is good enough for an N Scale layout. I haven’t regretted going this route at all.
The first items I printed were downloaded from Thingiverse. The engine house is one of those items. The version I downloaded from Thingiverse was HO scale. I scaled it down to N and printed it.
My initial goal was to create the structures I found in historic photos of Dola, Ohio. To meet this goal, I needed to create my own 3D files. I have used Blender to create motion graphics for many years. The GG1 animation I use in my video introductions was created in Blender. Below is a half rendered version of the GG1 showing the 3D wireframe on the right side of the photo.
Blender will export in all the common 3D printer file formats. All of the 3D printed items were going to be much less complicated than the GG1. Also, there would be no animation. A 3D print is made from a single frame of the Blender file. All I really needed to determine was the correct scale. I started with rail cars that I could measure using a caliper. I picked up an electronic caliper that would measure +/- 0.01 millimeters. My 3D printer has a resolution of 0.4 millimeters.
I did test prints like the one below. This is a hopper template, complete with a little handle. I could test out the fit using this template which printed in less than 15 minutes.
After I determined the exact size, I could make more complicated loads. Below is one Blender file with several types of loads for a hopper. I made these shapes using the terrain tool in Blender. The one on the left is mountains. The one on the right is river rock.
Eventually I was able to make loads that looked realistic by using the physics engine in Blender to smash objects and let gravity pile them onto the template rectangle. That is how I made the coal load.
The only downside to 3D printing is the print speed. The coal tower took a total of 17 hours to print. Of course, I didn’t sit and watch it print. Most of the printing happened while I was asleep. If you want something that looks great, it will take some time to print.
SCARM file for this layout is here.