The First Prints

After I got the cab modeled up, and extruded out a car from the profile of the cab, it was finally time to see the fruit of my efforts. Unfortunately, due to size constraints of my printer, I couldn't print the nosecone and car together in one piece.

Nosecone on baby track

Car, eating baby track

I was really happy when each of these pieces printed without much hassle. I had some problems with the car sticking to the build platform of my printer, but a couple of settings tweaks, and adding some surface area touching the platform with a brim of plastic around the edge allowed it to complete easily.

The print was the easy part. Next came sanding. A lot of sanding. More sanding that I would have ever thought. Some sanding could probably have been mitigated with primer that had some filler, but I thought of that a little late. After I thought it was silky smooth, I shot the two pieces with a coat of white spray paint. After letting the pieces dry I found out that the paint really showed just how rough the pieces really were. I decided at this point, before I did any more sanding that I would join the two pieces to make sure things were painted evenly, and to hopefully cover up the seam between the two.

I read online that superglue was the best way to join PLA pieces together. Many people had a lot of success with just simple superglue. Well, results may vary and my results were pretty bad. This was most likely due to the small surface area of the two objects I was trying to glue together. After a few trys and failures, the two pieces became one, and I was back to sanding. After a few million more coats of paint, and sanding and more paint, I was finally pretty happy with the result.

The result.

It was when I got to this point that I realized I had a problem with this blank canvas of a monorail cab. My limited artistic skill would make drawing or painting the details. I had a better idea... print in the detail!