Printing a railroad wheel
Last article I used a free, online solid modeling program called Onshape to make a wheel like the one discussed by Mike Lafond and published in the Garden Railways Magazine, December 2018.
I am going to print out a wheel using my Robo3D R1+ using PLA (polylactic acid) as the filament.
Exporting an STL file in Onshape
Log into onshape.com. Load the file that you have been working on. From the graphical window place the mouse in one corner above (or below) the object and drag the mouse across the object to select it. You should get the image above.
Finding the menu
If you right click anywhere in the graphical area you should get the menu shown:
We will be selecting the “Export...” selection next.
Filling out the menu
After left clicking on “Export...”, we get the form shown. All we have to do is fill out the form and have the file downloaded.
Filling out the export menu
For the File Name, you can see that I typed in “ 26inch passenger wheel” in the form. You can use any file name that you like. Continuing down the list, the Format is STL, the STL format is Binary, the Units are in Millimeter for my machine, (your machine might be different, please check), the Resolution is Fine and under Options, I choose to Download.
Downloading to the printer
Here is the one wheel that I just downloaded from Onshape sitting on the print plate. My machine uses MatterControl as the slicing program. It is shown above. I still have to adjust the part on the print plate so it lays flat.
Showing the finished product
The pictures above show the results as it came out of the printer. Needs some cleanup but that is not what is bothering me. They say that a picture is worth a thousand words; holding the part in your hand must be worth a million words. First the flange is very thin. Too thin for my liking. Next the distance from the tread of the wheel to the depression is too thin also. Next the depression is too deep. Again, this is my opinion and nothing more. Just doesn't look right. Time to fix it or do it all over again.
Summary
You can export files for you printer directly from Onshape. Once printed, it just isn't right for me. Now, it must be fixed or redrawn. I must think on this because to fix it might take as long as doing another part. That is something that you must consider when modeling.
In this article on 3D or three dimension printing, author Steven A. Berneberg writes, step-by-step, how to load and print a 3D railroad wheel for garden railroads.