Stabliofarmer

2 hours ago, GPS said:

I make no pretense, I just bodged my way through it, but it's a better finish than I've had with an aerosol. Takes a long time to dry though (days), probably due to the amount of thinners used. 

Thank you for the detailed response, a case of new is scary and requires practice, so easy to just stick with what's familiar. 

1 hour ago, Kirely said:

An airbrush will always give a superior finish but you need to invest in a good airbrush.  Cleaning is just a pain you have to live with, 5 mins to mix the paint, 1 minute applying the paint, 10 mins cleaning the airbrush. With a good brush you can control the amount of paint to any area and getting into those nooks and crannies is not a problem. I suppose it’s down to the amount of painting you do in a year to make the investment in a good airbrush worthwhile.

Dad buys and sells at auction all the time and returned one day with an airbrush and compressor, given the fancy wooden box it's presented in, and how silent the compressor is I think they're quite high quality brands, I forget the name now. 

As you say cleaning is an unavoidable pain, when spraying large quantities and multiple colours over short periods of time I imagine a less thorough clean is required, and it's just a case of making sure everything gets a deep clean before being put away for any long period of time. 

Lovely traditional toy set up, great to see! 

On 7/11/2020 at 6:01 PM, GPS said:

First time using an airbrush and I’m quite pleased with the results. Let’s see what it looks like tomorrow.......

That looks very very good. I have battled with the cheap airbrushes before and never got on with them, as you mention the faf of cleaning them out puts me off most. But every time I go to the car body supply shop the owner tells me off as his aerosols are three times the price of the same volume of paint! 

After seeing this I will be pulling the half decent airbrush that came in an auction job lot of tools and having another go.

Was it easier to get paint coverage in nooks and crannies such as around the linkage? I always end up going far to heavy with aerosol just to get all over coverage. 

Looks spot on that, don't recognise that Britain's figure, looks like a really versatile pose. 

With regards to wheels etc, I am currently starting too look at a pressure pot to improve the quality of my castings. This is mainly for figures as I intend to launch a range of them when time allows but there'd also be the added benifit of improving cast parts. 

This is something I'm exploring more as they prove to be the most profitable business option. A set of wheels have very little investment cost so would be happy to do commision builds for them. 

Some interesting ideas here, I've often debated including the scanned drawings/plans in build threads or making a website of them all as I have notepads full of stuff that's never got off the paper. I'd never charge for them as there's never the full details, just the rough shapes and sizes, the rest I make up/decide once there's something three dimensional I front of me. Will have a look at uploading some when I get home after summer on the farm. I see the forum has some sort of file/download store now, that could be the place for them. 

6 hours ago, sipher172 said:

I never realised how expensive 3D printing still was.  At least I don't need to learn how to use CAD just yet and I can be safe that plasticard and kraft knifes will be the cheapest way for a while to come.  

I assume on a home set up you could plonk out a roughly Bailey shaped and sized blob of plastic for the price of a roll or two of filament with an FDM printer. But to be at a quality where the sides look like they're made of sheet material and not 1:32 corrugated cardboard you'd want a high resolution resin printer. Otherwise you could build one from scratch with the amount of time you'd spend sanding and filling. 

The concrete panels looks spot on when they're in place Sean

11 hours ago, catkom3 said:

How about creating and selling stl files,??

Regards

Joe.

Price wise, to 3D print an entire trailer this sort of size, in a reasonable resolution would cost upwards of £250-300, which is simply too expensive for a product that you'll then have to prep for paint, assemble and finish. Once you've added all those cost, plus whatever I'd charge for the stl, say £20, your at a £400 model of a silage trailer. 

11 hours ago, Fenside MF said:

I was thinking along the lines of a bare bones kit as you get back from your printer, no tailgate rams and tipping rams supplied etc more for the advanced modeller,only asking as they are really good trailers James

I had considered this and it may be an option in the future, the issue arises when you put 'kit' to anything some people expect to be able to pull it out of the box and slap it together as easy as lego, regardless of what description you give it. If I find time next year I may tweak the current assembly errors and offer the laser cut parts though. 

Overwhelmed by the responses to this topic, thank you! 

I think sharing info like this is vital to expanding the hobby. It was in depth step by step topics that allowed me to learn in the first place. 

On 6/26/2020 at 12:27 AM, Fenside MF said:

Any chance of you selling kits at all James?

Sadly not Jamie, to make a kit for something like this is as much work as making the finished articles. 

That looks a tidy little kit Stan, I assume they're hard to come by? 

Thank you folks

I think the craft knife will always have its place John. The art of scratch building is certainly not one I'd like to see die out. I think the price of good quality laser cutters, 3D printers and CAD software has a way to drop yet before they can really try and push the cutting mat off the table. 

I think I'm going to be really 'chasing' up what 3D printers are capable of with my next agricultural project mind! 

Cheers Barry, Naomi was most helpful! 

Yes, luckily Bailey include some dimensions on their brochures, so they give the rough shapes then the rest is just guess work based on photos. 

Thank you folks, it's nice to share an insight into what's going on behind the scenes. Usually forget to take enough photos to share these days. 

Bailey didn't have any of these no, I spoke to them a number of years ago at the Great Yorkshire and they where interested. But I was alot younger and far less confident in my builds than I am now so didn't persue it. 

The issue with generic parts is once your into the scratch build levels people are spending so much that they want it to be exactly as the real one, and each manufacturer has a different style. The truck ones are tricky now that Marge have set the bar so high, I can't compete with that detail and that's the level people expect at the moment. 

A friend keeps nagging for a KTwo ejector model so I may try again with a batch of them when I can get back to the CAD software at uni. 

May actually be to your benefit Sean. The rough surface of a matt finisheans decals adhere poorly, I've seen it alot with truck stuff where they recommend a gloss coat, decals, then a matt lacquer to finish before final weathering. 

All comes together with the paint Sean, weathering should set it off nicely.

21 minutes ago, Tractorman810 said:

interesting james ,it  certainly seems a lot on the cutting and materials front at first, but when you work out time cutting each its pennies really, does it have to be acrylic on that? or can they do it in say 3 or 54 mm plasticard, which seems to be the euro guys route at times, 

shame the wheels put your costs up at 10 each, or is that 10 for a set of 4? thats the hardest thing to get right i guess if theres nothing already out there of the shelf .

The problem with plasticard is that is contains PVC, this means when the laser burns it chlorine gas is released, this is both dangerous to humans, but also damages components of the cutter, my chemistry is rusty but I think it eats away at the aluminum runners that the laser head runs on. 

The Europeans use a CNC router, the major setback with this is you can't cut square corners, they will always have a rounded/fillited edge to them. I also haven't found a small scale CNC routing company to send work too. 

Sorry I've not been very clear about the wheels. So I order a single print of a wheel, and a single print of a rim. I then make two moulds using the rim master, and four moulds of the tyre (two left hand and two right hand). Therefore the master costs are spread across all 40 casts. From memory the final price per wheel and tyre is below £1.

I also had a couple of specials in the batch. 

Jack on the forum ordered one with an auto sheet, a nice little challenge to get working. It is operated via a small handle on the side of the trailer. 

The finished pieces, after a number of hours assembly per model, so much time goes into cutting the rams down too, a horrible job that cuts your fingers to pieces. Note how much the shade of green varies. 

To start with I put one set of parts together to check everything fitted. A couple of mistakes/issues where apparent from a manufacturing point of view. The acrylic has a protective film on both sides to stop scratching. They leave this on when lasercutting to stop any scorching of the material, not something that is an issue when I would be painting the surface. So the film had to be removed from every single part, imagine separating hundreds of pieces of double-sided tape! Not fun. So for future reference ask them to remove the film before cutting! 

Also I'd made a few errors whith my drawing so cut some parts that I'd intended to engrave. No real problem as I just glued them back together. I have used Tetrosol 12 to glue the Acrylic, it's the industrial equivalent to Ema plastic weld so fuses the plastic together but takes a few minutes to set rather than seconds. 

With all the parts fitting together I got the production line up and running.

Once the acrylic was glued together I added all the sheeting. For this I used 0.5mm plasticard, glued it into place and then scored and snapped to size. It was then time for painting, lockdown hit at this point, and I wasn't sure what to do about paint. I managed to find an online supplier that mixed and shipped RAL colours, the cost of posting paint meant my paint costs where doubled! Living at uni in a first floor flat at the time didn't help the painting situation either. I resorted to spraying on a cardboard box on the driveway when the weather permitted. Eventually everything was painted, a mammoth task! 

For those that may find it useful I went with RAL 6002 for the colour. It works for the new Bailey Green, as you will see in the photos it's shade varies massively depending on the light. If you where modeling an older Bailey RAL 6005 is a closer match, but not perfect. 

I'll include an upclose of the cast wheel here, they where a nightmare, the tread blocks are too small for the rubber to freely flow into. So I had to rub the rubber onto the walls of the mould first, then fill the rest of the mould. Fine for a couple of casts, frustrating by the 40th tyre! Very pleased with the finished item though. 

I shared abit about these in the workbench topic but thought you all might like to see the process in abit more detail. 

I had intended to do a large number of these using laser cutting to speed up the process and make them a profitable build. Sadly that didn't quite work out, a few factors took far too long to make even with the time saving so the batch of 10 will be the only batch. 

The project starts as with all my builds, on paper, with a pencil and a ruler. A front, side and rear view where required to then build the CAD model. 

The CAD model is built on SolidWorks. I create each individual part I want laser cut as a separate piece, and then bring them in to an assembly allowing me to check the fit of all the parts. You can also see the wheels and mudguards in these shots that have been custom designed for the models with the CAD model used to 3D print master patterns that where then moulded. I used Shapeways for the printing and their fine detail plastic material. The cost for one wheel and rim is approximately £10, I think the mudguard was £8. It took about 4 days from ordering to them arriving on the doorstep. 

The parts are compiled into a .dxf file and I sent them off to CutLaserCut. I asked for a quote to cut 1, 10 and 15 trailers. I have attached the quotes to demonstrate how orders of this nature had to be large. They have a minimum set up cost of £45, then charge per minute of cutting after that. Therefore the price was the same to cut 10 trailers as it was to cut 1,only the material costs increase. 

Within a week this box of goodies had landed at my door. Well packaged and perfectly cut.

Not sure how I missed the knock out trailer Stan, it looks like a fantastic model, packed with detail! 

I think Broom finish maybe the American term, basically just lightly roughened surface, most yards I'm in are haulage/truck ones, rather than farms so a rough finish is better for traction, particularly in the wet, ruins the toes on boots when your mechanicing on it mind!

Ah I thought that might be the case, around us its all broom finished yards so didn't really know. Should look great when they're all in place!