The view from my work bench - 3D printed lighthouses
Posted by Roger Dawson on January 9, 2022, 1:01:36
I have always been interested in lighthouses and wanted to combine my interest in ships with models of both ships and lighthouses made to the same scale. There have been around 100 lighthouse models made for sale in 1/1250 and 1/1200 scale but many interesting and spectacular lighthouses have never been made in our scale and so I have bought and made lighthouses in many scales over the past 65 years while wishing that they could become 1/1250 scale models one day. Well now they can and, indeed, 20 have done so in the last 8 weeks. Fortunately, the standardisation of lenses and lanterns allows these features to be transferred from one model to another. Lighthouses by the same designer had similar features eg stepped bases and castellated balconies on Walkers lighthouses and the filament printer can easily manage horizontal slicing and the scanner software copes well with symmetry about a vertical axis. At last I can produce lighthouses with tapered and fluted octagonal towers. The filament printer is particularly good at printing tapered towers because it first prints a base layer and then goes round and round building the tower as a hollow structure and coming to a point at the top so that the whole is hollow, light, self supporting and clean enough to paint without washing. If you want to see photographs, email me.
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