The Wildcat Valley Railway has one small coal mine so far and I plan to add another. It will need a few customers for this product, so I have created a coal trestle to dump hoppers of coal and now I need a building with a scale to sell the coal. My father-in-law was named William Woodrow Keel and though he never delt with coal, I thought it would be good to remember him on my layout. Hence, we will have the W.W. Keel Coal Company.
I found the photo of a coal company building and scale online and decided it was a good fit for my layout. I will use just one entrance over the scale and eliminate the entrance on the right in the picture. I did not have any brick buildings matching this, so I decided to 3D print the main building and use wood to create the roof and uprights.
Designing and Modeling the Basic Structure
The coal company will need a scale to weigh the incoming and outgoing vehicle to know how much to charge. Searching online, I found a few pictures on scales and chose this one to model. I use FreeCAD to do much of my design work for 3D prints. On the right is the 3D model I created to represent the scale.
I decided to create the structure and .stp file to print on my Mars 3 resin printer since it was such a small footprint. From the photo, I determined the footprint to be about 12′ x 12′. In HO scale this would be about 1.66″ x 1.66″. The upper fixed window sashes will be printed separately and added once I have glued in the .005 clear plastic “glass” on the movable sashes. The building includes the floor and a channel in the back corner to hide the wiring. The roof will be slanted toward the rear, hence the stepped blocks. There will be a layer of basswood strips to cover the printed floor.
Failed Print for Christmas
Well, you cannot have success without a few failures along the way. I went down to check on the build this morning and found a problem. I have not looked too closely yet, but some portions of the floor are missing. The floor was set parallel to the build plate, and I thought I had enough supports to keep it attached. WRONG! I now need to empty the resin tank and remove the portions of the floor that are stuck to the FEP film.
Time to go clean up and start over. I will probably tilt the building slightly for the next build to avoid this problem. I hope I don’t create another.
