1:72 Complete Iowa Battleship 16"-50 cal Turret with interior down to the magazine

That's a possible idea, Right now I'm going to go with my original thoughts to keep the geometry as it really is. I'm going to light each level so it will be more visible. WIth decks like the elecctric deck you almost have to look directly down on it to really see everything. Since that's not really possible, I'm going to leave it as it is for now. Keep the ideas coming.

Happy Monday! I survived my 77th birthday weekend with a great dinner at Pocini hear in Louisville. My birthday also marks the 13th anniversary of our moving to DaVille. It's been a very enjoyable 13 years and we've seen our grandkids grow up to be young men.

Got back in the shop today and while the printer was humming away (actually it sounds more like it's breathing) I was cleaning up previous prints and making some repairs. I plugged the drain holes in all the powder trunk segments using Bondic. I also cleaned up the new rear gun compartment prints. One of them had a broken cradle link and instead of reprinting it again, I chose to remove the broken cradle and replace it with a perfect one from an extra print I had. I removed the old cradle using a razor saw and sanded down the remnants to make a flat surface. I then removed the good one using the Dremel with the Flexi-shaft and a needle point diamond-coated burr. I didn't attempt to cut it off flush. Instead I removed the entire floor area with the cradle attached. Then, with the cradle isolated I was able to remove it from the piece of floor with a razor saw. I'll reattach it tomorrow.

Notice: This is tne new and improved gun area with the proper ladder that leads up to the ofc's booth floor level. The piping really came out sharply in these prints.


I had mentioned that I was printing separate traverse pinion assemblies so the gears would be properly formed and could rotate. This will facilitate assembly.
Even though I made the bores to be .250", I find that they come out a tiny bit undersized and use a 1/4" reamer to get a perfect fit.



I replaced the missing door lock dogs using some B guitar string (0.013"). Even though they're not perfect, they will serve considering how difficult it will be to view them. When painted nicely they will blend in.



Some more little bits needed drawing and printing. There is a hydraulic buffer on the electric deck shell that impacts two large bumpers that are attached to the inner wall of the barbette. The purpose of this assembly is to phyically block the turret from rotating to a position where it a) impacts another part of the ship and/or b) fires a shell that can impact the ship. In additon there are a bunch of large casting that are massively bolted to the electric deck shell that lock the rotating parts of the turret to the non-rotating parts. These clamps are pretty obvious details and I'm including them. The prints came out sweet! The clamps keep the turret firmly seated on it's roller bearings. I find it hard to imagine what it would take to dislodge a 2,500 ton object. If anyone has another resason for the clamps, please let us know.

This is the drawing that was in the 16"-50cal Users Manual.



This is my drawing of these parts.


The bumpers are on the opposite side from the buffers and will possibly be out of sight behind the barbette shells. I may not need to include them. I did re-draw the pan deck to have another cutaway to show off the travese hydraulic motors. I'm also going to attempt to print the ENTIRE pan deck including the walls as a single part. I was orginally going to form the tapered walls out of sheet styrene. Now there's a caveat... The entire print doesn't actually fit the machine. There's some small areas that are just outside the print range, but I think that I can work with this. It would save a lot of heartache for me to try and form that tapered shell and then glue it to the UV resin.

Here's the clamp and buffer prints before final cleaning. I only need one buffer, but it's no more time to print more. You never know. So far I'm made good use of some of my extra prints.



I also got some really nice prints (finally) of the outer halves of the powder scuttles. I had to reset the support scheme. Sometimes, the auto-orientation feature on the slicer doesn't get it right. It's probably looking at how to postion the part for the maximum amount of self-support. What it doesn't see is where the details are and what damage the supports will do to them. I get it right as much or more than the auto settings.



Here's how the pan deck looks of the slicer. I'm setting it up so the missing area will be right at the cutaway making it a little big bigger. There's also a tiny corner of the opposite side that shouldn't cause a problem either. If I have to I can rebuild it with Bondic. It takes a very large amount of supports to print an object of this size.



If this big print doesn't work I can always go back to plan A and build the walls with styrene. I found in looking at the drawing I was basing this print on was missing part of the traverse gear. I may print it without it and install it as a separate part. I also have to print the elevating screw machines and they too will be added afterwards.

I'm enjoying your modelling process even though some of it is a bit over my head, its just such great work. Also a belated Happy Birthday so nice to hear you had a good day and here is to many more.

Great work so far!

Thanks all for all the thoughts!

My experiment to attempt to print the entire pan deck did not work. Its large size and the fudging that I had to do to fit the supports onto the actual build area produced a part that could not be sustained by the support system. This is what I was greeted with when I went down to the shop this morning.



It wasn't as bad as it looked to clean it up. After removing the vat and draining the remaining resin, the entire mess popped off the FEP barrier at the vat's bottom. My FEP is wearing and needs replacement. Another clue that the FEP is getting bad is the job that's on the machine right now. Nothing printed! It's supposed to be the powder bag car that runs in the powder trunk. When I say "nothing", I mean nothing. There is no printed material on the build plate. It's all stuck to the FEP at the bottom of the vat.

Before this last flub, I did get one more print today: the entire elevating screw mechanism. I'm printing it as five parts: the hydraulic reserve tank, the base including the brackets to hold the tilting box, the hydraulic motor and coupling, the tilting box itself and a separate lifting screw. The tilting box will snap into the brackets and will be adjustable to account for the different angles depending on the gun's elevation. The screw is beautiful and the threads are discernable.

I'll show these pics tomorrow. I got the sight stations printed with the corrected design. I oringinally had them sitting entirely on the gun girders, but found that the gun girders don't extend all the way the to the gun house sides. The outer part of the sight unit sits on the turret floor plate and the inner part sits on the elevated gun girder. I picked up these details in the tour.

The prints needed a little tender loving care to repair a couple flaws and I made use of the rejects in making the repairs. I also got a nice print of the bulkhead and access hatch to the sight station compartments.

Those two thin rods had some troubles on one end that I repaired with Bondic. I had to replace one of the operator's seats. It's a complicated and delicate part.



I originally had some MDF shims on the kit's base to build up the recess to support the rear gun compartments. I replaced those parts with a styrene piece cut from the scrap resulting from the turret roof cutaway. It was a little bit thicker and I corrected that by sanding it down. Using styrene enabled me to glue it with solvent cement instead of CA, which, on styrene is not always reliable. I actually am going to have to add more floor to this piece since the kit doesn't actually have a gun house floor plate.



With the failed pan deck I'm going to plan B which is print the base and make the conical sides out of sheet styrene. Using the "Unwrap and Flatten Faces" extension, I was able to take this geometry and make it into a cutting pattern. The way the system unwrapped it has the end right at the small cutaway gap. I don't like it there since there's nothing to glue to. I'm going to rearrange it so the joint wil be where there's full material. I'm also thinking about using a backing plate and screws and nuts to positively hold the cylinder together. This could be on the back side away from the viewer.



I also made a pattern of the tranverse bulkhead which will also be made of sheet styrene.

I no longer have a working copy of CorelDraw on my Mac. I had to run it using VM Fusion Windows emulator software with a partitioned main drive. It's been a pain to do this, but I love Coreldraw and they didn't have a Mac version. My CD 2017 suddenly stopped booting up and I couldn't find the fault. I had contacted VM Fusion and Corel, but nada. I bought CorelDraw Essentials to maybe find something that worked, but essentials is so stripped down that it can't export any other vector formats, only bitmaps, and that doesn't work for laser cutters. However, I did find a free Mac-based vector program, Inkscape that does moost of what I need and it's on Mac so I don't have to fuss with the partition. I've been a Corel user since version 1.0 in the 1990s, so I wasn't relishing having to learn another graphics package. Oh well... learning new stuff keeps you young. Well... at least it's supposed to keep your brain young.

Inkscape has one drawback. It let's you make a drawing that spans more than one page, but you can't print it directly. My 18" styrene pattern is too wide for one page in my printer and has to be tiled. Corel lets you tile it right in the printer settings. Instead I had to export each page as a PNG file and print them out of the Mac preview app. Workaround!. Annoying, but it got the job done.

I only have two more details to draw: the air receivers that line the annual space between the Powder Flat and the Magazine. I also want to prepare more 16" projectiles to line the outer, non-rotating space in the two projectile flats. in other words, there is light at the end of the tunnel and hopefully it's not a locomotive headlight. I am also plowing through the printing challenges. Besides a few more little details, I have to print new inner projectile flats, another corrected electric deck and the powder flat. Each of these represents an overnight job. So I should be done making parts sometime next week. I am really itching to get to painting. I'm tired of looking at all this monochromatic gray.

My digital file folder for this project almost has a 1,000 files in it. I will have to purge a lot before archiving since much of it is old designs that have been superceded.

INCREDIBLE!

With your printing history I am not supprised your FEB is ended, but printing really nothing on the baseplate isn't a FEB problem I think. Maybe the builtplate wasn't that cleaned up and the foots didn't stuck on the plate, or you have accidentially change the base ecposure time, out of level of the baseplate, mwah, that could also be a cause, but in your sitiation I don't thnk thats te problem, maybe sanding the builtplate?

'Bout the rest, just agreed with the person above me

Amazing stuff.

Thanks guys!. The new FEP printed perfectly and I DID re-level the build plate just to be sure. The entire job was stuck to the FEP. I'm using the Wham-Bam flexi plate with very good results. I never removed the actual build plate from machine so I don't disturb any geometry. I was noticing more and more sporadic fallure where supports were broken and struff on the FEP. I was suspeciting that it was aging. I'm getting a few months printing out of each change which is significantly better than the origianl Elegoo FEB material.

I completed a working elevation rig, but as I will relate, am re-printing the tilting box. I slightly enlarged the screw's hole to make it a nice easy fit. The screws are delicate and I didn't want to have to force them anywhere. The tilting box support scheme had them on the face will all the nifty bolt detail and it go pretty distorted by support removal. I'm reprinting them with this detail facing out so no supports will be on it.



i had to open the bracket holes just a taste (#14 drill) so the tilting box lugs would fit easily. This was a perfect example of why I use the Tenacious/Elegoo ABS resin mix. The brackets remained flexible enough even after post-curing that I could bend them sideways and insert the tilting box without breaking anything.

Another area with support damage is the B-end hydraulic motor (to the rear of the tilting box). I may reprint those too. That orientation was due to the mechanical link that emits from the side. To print it reverse, that part would have been facing the plate pushing the part way into the air with even more supports. I may take another crack at this too.

I had to mill out a relief pit in the base below the tilting box to the screw would have a place to move about as I moved the tilting box to the correct angle for the guns.



This view shows how the screw will fasten into the gun slide. The upper end of the screw is not very robust and I will have to be careful in drilling it for the pin. I may use some micro-tubing as a liner and a small pin within. I could redesign the screw upper end and give it more mass...



One of the last parts to design is the air bottle complex that are arrayed in the powder flat annular space. These bottles store the compressed air that eventually makes it way up to the breach block and feeds the jets that purge the just-fired barrel of any embers that could fire the next charge prematurely. This was a more complex drawing task than I anticipated taking several hours. These are printed in sets of five as you see here. I had to match the curvature of the array to that of the i.d. of the outer shell.

I set up the printing of this last night. Speaking of last night, I got nice prints of the powder cars after a complete failure with the worn FEP. I then set up and started printing the projectile flat inner assembly T1. If it's good, I'll immdiately start printing T2.



I was going to fabricate the middle gun alcove out of styrene, but just decided to do it as a resin print with the wall detail included. I'll draw that this morning. Beyond that, the only drawings left to are the officer's periscopes (2) inside part, and the back turret wall detail (electrical boxes and cabling).

Great work so far!

I visited the naval museum in Karlskoven, Sweden last month.

Mind boggling stuff.

Bigger scale, but great minds do think alike. An Iowa turret at that scale would be huge, and way too big for me to build with my current technology. But it is inspiring to see that I'm on e similar track, but my version will have more detail, by a factor of two.

Had some strange prints today...

The powder cars came out... okay... but had some delamination on the flat interior surfaces of the shelf area. I decided to reinforce with Bondic, grind it off and leave it be. They were be hard to visualize and not worth the extra time to fix the drawings... yes... the delamination was a drawing problem with some inner layers causing discontinuities, nor worth the extra resin to reprint.



And i had the same kind of delamination on the projectile flat T2. Again, I decided to try a fix instead of spending a half hour to re-draw and then reprint. I know where the drawing defects are and it would have required starting over from scratch to create the object without the interior layers causing the problem.

Here's what the damaged area looked like.



In these kinds of errors, the resin peels off like Phyllo pastery. Instead of attempting to fill all of this with something and sand it flat, I decided to build a false floor out of styrene. I also wanted to close those rectangular openings for the powder trunks. I'm installing the trunks on each deck instead of feeding them through the decks.

I made paper templates to fill the space on both the deck and the ceiling below.

I measured the diameter with a dividers and then measured that distance with my digital caliper, divided it in half and used the same divider to cut the paper circle. I have two dividers with one point each sharpened to a chisel edge perpendicular to the diameter. I use these for cutting all kinds of circles. It too three tries to get the diameter just right. I'm using 0.040" stock which is a tad thick, but this, like the powder cars, is going to be very difficult to visualize so the extra thickness won't cause any trouble.

I also had to cut out holes for some of the printed appliances and that too was a bit trial and error.



Notice in the above that one of the air cylinders is cut off. That too delaminated badly. I eventually ground it flat to the floor and will print a cylinder and install it separately.

Underneath I made paper patterns too. For these I used the rubbing method to transfer the shape below to the paper by rubbing a pencil over the edges under the paper. I cut them a bit large and trimmed to the fit.



I used the same modified dividers to repeatedly scribe the circle into the styrene and then snipped around the edges so I could break the styrene on the scribed lines. You have to take special care to break out pieces that on a curve to avoid breaking the styrene in places you don't want to.



I hand sanded the edges to round it all out. And then tried the fit. It was good. I needed to make the openings for the hatch, tank and the motor sticking up through the floor. I used a special chisel I got from MicroMark years ago which cut perfect 90 degree corners. i mount it in the drill press and use solid blocking underneath so when I crank the press down hard it doesn't force the table down too. I got the chisel specifically to cut window openings in model structures.



With all the cuts made the false floor fit very nicely. I did the same for the bottom pieces. I may glue these all in with 3M transfer tape adhesive. It's a very powerful adhesive and leaves no mess. Otherwisie I may use epoxy. CA can sometimes cause styrene to decompose. Here are the paper patterns being fitted.



And here's the styrene piece in place (not glued) with the center hole fitted to the central column.



I also started working on the patterns for the shells, the first of which is the pan deck walls. My print out was the wrong developed length. I don't know where the errors crept in as there were many places to do so. I wrapped and taped it around the actual pan deck base and got an accurate fit. This way I will be able to split the wall on the backside where I wanted to have it. I will translate this too into styrene and as i noted yesterday, I will probably put a backing plate at the junction to hold the ends together. I'm a little anxious about the upper unsupported edge. It's not going to hold a circular shape. I may cut an upper ring... not to wide... to form and hold the upper edge. The lower outer shells will have circular decks attached to them to serve this purpose.



I was going to print the upper traverse parts and just started the machine. I noticed that the base was forming only on some parts of the job and were just little dots elsewhere. Those little dots were the bottom ends of supports that were starting to print on the plate without the raft. I knew immediately what was happening and killed the job after only one or two base layers were laid down. The slicer has a quirt. When you use the heavy supports the base is at level X, when you switch to light supports, the base level raises .5mm. If you're using all light supports, the slicer knows to put the base at the plate level, but when you mix supports like I do, I have to watch where the raft is sitting. When the raft is on the plate, when viewed from below, the color is bright green. Like this:



When you raise the part just .5mm this is what it looks like. That lifted part will fail. The raft will be attached to nothing and won't even start to form.



If I know that the raft is no longer on the plate, I can adjust the z-height in the slicer and bring it back down, but in this case i missed it. I went back and fixed the job in the slicer and will reprint later. In 3D printing like a lot of other things, the details will kill you.

Such complexity and determination.

Excellent work so far!

What kinda slicer program you use? I went over to Chitubox pro and it works great, even with mixed supports.
But you are right, 3D printing isn't that easy as many peaople thing. Yesterday , to times an error on printing just 2 jigs. The print with the small parts are fine, but the blocks are stuck to the FEB, first time, my fault, did't get the model in the 45 angle, but second time, I really don't know

I see in your last pic a lot of supports, are the really needed? I think reducing them with 40% the parts will print also . Further, I see a bit overexposure, may lower the time a bit? I've done a couple of exposuretest and took the average time on different layerheights

I using Elego waterwash and use 2.5 sat 0.05 mm, 2,3 at 0.04 and 2.1 at 0.03

Something to say 'bout the gun technical stuff, I can't. Didn't even seen such a gun in real life

ChiTuBox Pro is mine also. I had to adjust the light support setting so it didn't change the Z-height. The big support load is based on where the slicer is showing red. Also if the surface is parallel to the build plate, it needs tons of supports or it will delaminate. It's that bridging problem. When I can tip the part, I can reduce that, but in a print like the gun girder, where I can only fit it in the machine with all the flats horizontal, I have add more supports than the slicer is doing automatically.

And….

I have some news...

I tested positive for COVID today and I'm now relegated to quarantining upstairs. Still have my laptop. Symptoms are like flu. In other words, low-grade fever and feel like crap. They gave an antiviral, not Paxlovid, since it reacts negatively with other meds I take. They gave me Molnupiravir.

So until I'm well enough to quarantine in the shop work is here