1:32 Animated Model of the Battleship New Jersey Steering Gear Systems

[Builder 2010]

The lower rudder hub printed beautifully. The only thing that didn't were most of the plugs that are created when you "drill" drainage holes in hollow objects. The plugs are tapered so they can be pressed in. With a little sanding, the holes disappear. All of them save one ended up stuck to the barrier film, and yes, I had to empty the vat and remove any stuck resin. I will fill the holes with Bondic. Takes a little longer, but with good results. The rudder shaft sildes perfectly through the hole I created.

By drawing the skin and printing with it, saves me a lot of painstaking work in applying a skin.

The upper large part of the hub just finished printing too. In this case ALL of the plugs printed, but a part of the welding flange that wasn't attached to the part's body, failed to print. This is a non-important detail which I, frankly, am not sure how to incorporate into the model.

If I'm keeping this detail, I will fabricate it. Not worth wasting the resin to reprint.

The next part that's going on the printer is the leading edge part (fairwater) that goes on the that squared-off front wall. It will have an aircraft-style water-dynamic edge when finished.

Ryan sent me some more images of the hydraulics room, specifically the gauge panel. He also sent me the entire index of every blueprint the ship has. There are hundreds of them! I sorted out those that pertain to steering and then further chose those that would contain the information I'm seeking. On some I wasn't sure if they would provide value, so Ryan's going to review them for me to make that determination. He's then going to photograph those that are pertinent so I can use them to finish up the project. It's great to have a man on the inside.

 

[Wurger]

 

[Gnomey]

Great work so far!

 

[Builder 2010]

Thank you!

The upper part printed well except for the welding flanges. I going to remove the bad ones and reprint just the flanges and glue them on. There was no errant resin stuck to the barrier film.

The leading edge just finished printing and is perfect.

I didn't realize that the curved inner surface of the bottom part was very thin. It started separating due to post-cure shrinkage.

I chamfered the outer edges a big to give more surface for the Bondic and then used it to close the gaps. Worked fine.

I tried fitting the two parts together and they work very well. I will epoxy them together once I do the final cleanup on the part.

You can see the missing welding flange. Should not be a problem.

Still have to fill all those drain holes. I have a lot of good plugs from the top part print and I'll use them on all the viewer facing faces. For those in the back, I will fill the holes with Bondic. All the holes need to be sealed. They could continue to weep water, or any uncured resin that may be lurking there and that ruins the paint job.

 

[Wurger]

 

[Builder 2010]

I have been going slowly crazy attempting to put a skin on the Rudder Forging sent to me by John Miano. It's a AutoCad version file that import as a wire frame. I split it in half to make it "easier" to add the skin to it. Those quotes are intentional.

There is a tool, Sandbox, in SketchUp. Within that there is "From Contours" that theoretically skins over wire frames. It does, but it also makes a mess. It connects points that have nothing to do with the selected paths.

This is a particularly onerous area to skin. It looks easy, but it's not. Part of the problem lies with some of the cross lines, not actually intersecting their corresponding verticals making connecting the points almost impossible.

And this is what I got when I used the Sandbox Tool. To remove all the errant lines often removes good lines too.

I'm enlisting help on SketchUp's forum to find a better solution. The other way is too manually connect all the end points that exist on the curve to those correspond to the other side of the future plane. This is not too bad when there are not to many facets. But when SU converts the AutoCad file, it add hundreds of facets on the curves and even on the straight lines. I have tried to connect all of them, but invariably, I accidentally erase something when doing a cleanup operation and have to start all over again.

This inner plane is the worst. The problem is with the part itself. There are very few parallel surfaces. Many taper in two directions including the fillets at the corners. I will prevail eventually. It's a critical part and I can't leave it out. I may have to change it anyway to make it more printable.

This is the shape when it's skinned.

On another front. Primed and painted the parts that are complete.

Here's the Rudder Hub. The last iteration of printing in three parts (plus some fixing) worked well. The upper portion is painted red primer since this is inside the ship's framing. The exposed part is water line (hull) red (Tamiya Dull Red Spray).

I assembled the sliding parts, masked them and painted the exposed areas.

I then painted the ram parts sky gray and its foundation light gray. I then assembled one unit to see if it would work. Looks great… doesn't it.

But it didn't slide at all. There is a slight unparallel condition that binds it up tight. The bearing clearances are very tight and much more tight than the resin printing process can accommodate. Part of the problem was not getting the drilled hole through the ram perfectly in the center of the diameter. With a simple drill press and none of the precision alignment tools I would use if I had an actual machine shop, I got one hole eyeballed okay, but the other was slight off the axis and this forces the crosshead slightly askew and its bearings binding.

I also broke some of the parts in trying to get them together and these just got reprinted successfully.

At this point was I a bit dejected and was ready to throw in the towel regarding animating the model. I immediately came up with plan B… a static model with an animated video showing all the motion.

This afternoon, I tried the model without the crosshead bearing liners. The ram slld nicely. If I leave out the liners, the crosshead has a lot of room to accommodate the misalignment. I am worried about the wear of resin touching stainless steel. There's a lot of room. I will see how this works further down the line. I was just about to take the servo back to the hobby shop, when I decided to try Plan C. It will build to a beautiful static model, so Plan B is a viable option.

Stay tuned.

 

[Wurger]

 

[Builder 2010]

Milestone day: got the ram system assembled. Leaving off the brass bushings on the crosshead slides did provide enough slack so the rams slide. That said, one of them is still binding a bit mid-travel. If I can exercise it and add some lube I can still go with Plan A (animated versio). If I can't I will go with Plan B (static model with video).

I started assembly by using some thread lock on the center post on the connecting rod spindles. This cured pretty fast and did exactly what I wanted it to do; secure in the inner race to the spindle. The other joint; the outer race to the connecting rod bores, was quite as successful with one breaking loose. I had used thin CA to secure it. This time, I used a thin film of epoxy and that did the trick. I am still worried that if one of the those joints breaks loose on the bottom rod under the cross head, it would be impossible to fix.

I had to connect all the rods before installing the units. The lower one is unaccessible after assembly.

I first tried gluing the cylinders with thick CA, but it didn't hold well. As it was I had to break those joints because I had the pairs reversed. With the epoxy, I clamped them until cured.

I've drawn the high pressure hydraulic lines, but will not print them. Instead, they're going to be bent wire. I'm also going to fab the their pipe supports out of soldered brass so they'll be more robust. The only thing I'll print are a few large hex-couplings that lie in the middle of the their runs.

There's no rudder stock yet below the crank. The connecting rods are supporting the crank in the image.

I also detail painted the lower crank support frame showing the manual worm gear system and I detailed the gear box for the position indicator drive (not shown)

I'm working hours and hours attempting to draw the rudder hinge hub. I will eventually get it right. Persistence is my forte.

 

[SaparotRob]

That looks dang impressive.

 

[Wurger]

 

[Gnomey]

Excellent work so far!

 

[Builder 2010]

It's been 14 days since I started designing the rudder bearing for 3D printing. As of this morning I was getting ready to throw in the towel for the whole project. Between the binding of the ram mechanism and my seeming inability to design the bearing, the whole project was going nowhere fast.

That ENDED today! I had gone much further than I realized on the design. I was on iteration four or five with the wireframe given to me by John Miano, but the final things needing to be done, were not major. There was four areas of drawing-from-CAD wireframe that were causing me great trouble.

1. There were very few parallel surfaces. This meant using the PUSH-PULL tool to extrude the part to 3D created a faulty part. Many of these faces had to be created by using various skinning tools or lacing the surface back and forth to build a surface mesh one triangle at a time. I did literally hundreds of these.
2. I have several tools to build surfaces from contours, but they were hampered by many of the horizontal and vertical contour lines not interconnecting where they crossed. This created ambiguous geometry that the tools couldn't decipher correctly and they often created as much garbage as usable faces.
3. If I was drawing the object as an illustration, it would have been easy, but the requirements of creating a printable 3D object made things much more complicated. Every surface, whether I drew it from scratch or traced over lines on the wire frame, had to touch all the adjacent surfaces. If they didn't, and if they were water-tight solids, they would have printed, but separated into two things once off the printer. That coupled with all holes being closed and all faces being "normal" not reversed (which slicers don't recognize), made for many hours of detailed drawing and editing.
4. My choice to draw the part as 1/2 and then print its mirror image on the printer, while good for creating two absolutely identical halves, added more work to ensure that the flat surface that closed the 1/2 object, was also perfectly in contact with all their mating edges.

Today, I closed the last compound-curved corner (another complication) and created a single, solid and usable rudder hub. After some fiddling to get it translate to a printable STL file, I got the finished product.

I exported it to the printer, set up the support scheme and then mirrored it to create the mating half. To reduce resin consumption, I had the slicing software hollow out the part, and then, in the same program, created the drain holes needed to wash out the excess uncured resin that would trapped within the cavities.

Here's the part as rendered in VRay.

In the design, I had to adjust some of the spacing dimensions in the mating areas since my rudder hub varied a bit from the OEM blueprint. I'm glad I thought to check this before printing.

The second really big thing that happened to today was getting the ram mechanism to work in a realtively friction-free way so the servo has enough torque to move it. It was binding badly and I was thinking of plan B. Plan B was a static model with the motion shown on an animated video.

All it needed was some lubrication. I was concerned that the lower connecting rod was hitting the foundation frame's side. I thought I checked this clearance during design, but it was hitting something—or so I surmised—and it could be that connecting rod head. To fix that would have meant breaking the epoxy joint holding one of the cylinders and grinding clearance. NOT NEEDED.

First I just used a thin film of WD40 and the slide worked much better. I followed up with some synthetic lube used for model locomotives. This worked great! In the parts of travel that the system will use, they slid smoothly and are no longer an impediment to making the automated version.


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajfSSAPAF2k

Now, with no apparent show stoppers I can order the rest of the materials for the job. I was holding off until I could get these two things done.

 

[special ed]

It's been 14 days since I started designing the rudder bearing for 3D printing. As of this morning I was getting ready to throw in the towel for the whole project. Between the binding of the ram mechanism and my seeming inability to design the bearing, the whole project was going nowhere fast.

That ENDED today! I had gone much further than I realized on the design. I was on iteration four or five with the wireframe given to me by John Miano, but the final things needing to be done, were not major. There was four areas of drawing-from-CAD wireframe that were causing me great trouble.

1. There were very few parallel surfaces. This meant using the PUSH-PULL tool to extrude the part to 3D created a faulty part. Many of these faces had to be created by using various skinning tools or lacing the surface back and forth to build a surface mesh one triangle at a time. I did literally hundreds of these.
2. I have several tools to build surfaces from contours, but they were hampered by many of the horizontal and vertical contour lines not interconnecting where they crossed. This created ambiguous geometry that the tools couldn't decipher correctly and they often created as much garbage as usable faces.
3. If I was drawing the object as an illustration, it would have been easy, but the requirements of creating a printable 3D object made things much more complicated. Every surface, whether I drew it from scratch or traced over lines on the wire frame, had to touch all the adjacent surfaces. If they didn't, and if they were water-tight solids, they would have printed, but separated into two things once off the printer. That coupled with all holes being closed and all faces being "normal" not reversed (which slicers don't recognize), made for many hours of detailed drawing and editing.
4. My choice to draw the part as 1/2 and then print its mirror image on the printer, while good for creating two absolutely identical halves, added more work to ensure that the flat surface that closed the 1/2 object, was also perfectly in contact with all their mating edges.

Today, I closed the last compound-curved corner (another complication) and created a single, solid and usable rudder hub. After some fiddling to get it translate to a printable STL file, I got the finished product.

View attachment 893694View attachment 893695

I exported it to the printer, set up the support scheme and then mirrored it to create the mating half. To reduce resin consumption, I had the slicing software hollow out the part, and then, in the same program, created the drain holes needed to wash out the excess uncured resin that would trapped within the cavities.

View attachment 893696

Here's the part as rendered in VRay.

View attachment 893692View attachment 893693

In the design, I had to adjust some of the spacing dimensions in the mating areas since my rudder hub varied a bit from the OEM blueprint. I'm glad I thought to check this before printing.

The second really big thing that happened to today was getting the ram mechanism to work in a realtively friction-free way so the servo has enough torque to move it. It was binding badly and I was thinking of plan B. Plan B was a static model with the motion shown on an animated video.

All it needed was some lubrication. I was concerned that the lower connecting rod was hitting the foundation frame's side. I thought I checked this clearance during design, but it was hitting something—or so I surmised—and it could be that connecting rod head. To fix that would have meant breaking the epoxy joint holding one of the cylinders and grinding clearance. NOT NEEDED.

First I just used a thin film of WD40 and the slide worked much better. I followed up with some synthetic lube used for model locomotives. This worked great! In the parts of travel that the system will use, they slid smoothly and are no longer an impediment to making the automated version.


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajfSSAPAF2k

Now, with no apparent show stoppers I can order the rest of the materials for the job. I was holding off until I could get these two thingsB

Back in my working days, we had a lubricant for plastic and nylon which did not interact with the part - It was called Plastilube and may still be available.

 

[Builder 2010]

The wear surfaces are metal on metal. Only those over-large openings on the cross heads are resin and they're not really in contact. I think the lube I used is also good on nylon gears as it's designed for model train drives.

The parts just finished printing. The holes are drains to flush out uncured resin from the interior. I use 99% IPA and a syringe to do that. Perfect prints.

 

[Wurger]

 

[Builder 2010]

Today was a mixed bag. The rudder forging did print well and required very litte post-print work to make it work. I made some steel dowel pins, and, using the drain holes on the joint surfaces, was able to nicely mate the two halves.

Again, I used Bondic to close the drains on the outer surfaces. I fill them until the resin forms a convex surface extending above the part. I then use the mini-sander to level them out.

There is a 0.020" gap on the lower reaches of the part. This was a drawing error. The printer reporduced it perfectly. Instead of forcing it closed, I simply made a shim that nicely closed the gap.

I glued the two halves together with 5 minute epoxy.

That was the good stuff…

The part does not fit the hub as it should. I thought I was tracking these dimensions well during the design process, but apparently was not. It's not the first time I've done this. I had to sand about 1/8 off the top of the rudder forging to fit the space.

The forging is too small at the bottom and needs a piece of stock to fill it up.

But these are not the BIG problems. The big problem is I missed a detail in translalting the print to practice. There are "wings" on the rotating part that serve to streamline the water flow around the rudder joint called "Fairwaters". My fairwaters are impacting the edges of the rudder hub and prevent rotation of no more that a few degrees. I need 35º of travel in each direction.

Grinding the wings off so they would clear is possible, but… Because I hollowed out the part, the wall thickness is less than 3mm and I would expose the hollow interior. Filling that gap would be a mess and not worth the trouble.

I reviewed the drawings again, and the only correct way to fix this—if I still want the rudder to operate—is to redraw and reprint the rudder hub assembly. I also found that the upper weld flange is in the wrong place, so that needs correcting also. I would fix the lower gap and not have to shim it.

It's not insurmountable, just more time, effort and resin. In other words a pain in the behind. Stay tuned.

 

[Wurger]

 

[Builder 2010]

All the changes to the rudder hub are done and both halves are downloaded to the printer. It was worse thinking about it than doing it.

Today I did all the design and exporting of the rudder's framing. Went smoother than expected. Split the construction into two parts to fit on the printer. The halves will key together pretty well and snuggle into the rudder forginng.

It doesn't conform precisely to the profile drawings and not too well to John's 3D rendering. That said, John's 3D rendering doesn't conform to the profile prints either, so why should I worry. It makes a respectible and BIG rudder that should work just fine.

All those non-streamline corners will be shaped after printing. All the horizontals and verticals will be blended so the skinning will provide a smooth contour. Probably going to skin with balsa. Syrene would work as well, but doesn't glue well with CA whereas balsa glues like crazy with it. While balsa skinning isn't that strong—without a flberglass cover layer—it's going to be in an enclosure and shouldn't get handled.

Here's the bottom half and then as set up in the printer. The supports are a genuine forest that all must be carefully removed to reveal the part.

And the upper half:

These too are downloaded to the printer. It's all waiting for some more resin to arrive from Amazon. The rudder was one of the parts of this model that gave me pause. It was complex, large, curvy and hard to visualize. My motto is "So what!" Just do something and see what happens. Stay tuned.

 

[Wurger]

 

[Gnomey]

Excellent work so far!