5" 38 Mark 28 Twin Gun Secondary Battery from Iowa Class Battleships

Am impressed and I like the 1st setup.

Great work so far!

O
M
G
How did I miss the start of this?????? I dunno!
I only found it when I started my own S2F thread.
Your work is brilliant annnnd encourages 3D modeling.
Like, would I? Could I? Should I???????
I will take the time to review what you have posted,
at a reasonable hour.

Glad you found it!

It's been a while since I updated this post. I have been working on five projects at once; three of which are commission. This technically is a commission although I'm not charging anything for it. When I last left you, I had to rebuild my 3D printer. I installed a new LCD panel which went well although more trouble than I thought. It's printing well now. I also found out recently, when testing my exposure setting with a new test article (Starship from 3DRS) that I was under-exposing my resin by 20% since I got this machine more than a year and a half ago. When I initially calibrated it I used a simple flat calibration piece and derived 2.5s per layer. With this new part, 2.5s didn't work. I printed a test from 2.1s to 3.1s by twos. 3.1 was it! It explained why I was getting such warpage and support breakage. When exposure is too short, the resin doesn't have enough cure time to develop structural integrity. The warpage is due to the amount of hardening that still needed to take place in post-curing. And the support breakage (a resultant delamination) was due to the resin being too weak to perform.

During all this, I was designing the ventilation system that goes into the gun house. It's a tricky design since the drawing is unscaled and undimensioned.



I had designed the overhead I-beams (wrong, I might add) and then Ryan came through with a passal of images showing the entire ceiling of the gun house (also good views of the ready service room and magazine). I have four beams. There are only two. I also had lateral beams. There are none. I also needed to know how the cross vent passed around the I-beams. They don't pass, they go through. Makes sense since head room is so limited. I drew the assembly and decided to print it all in one go, I-beams included to ensure it all lines up. I did't design the blower system yet as that will be a separate part to glue in.



This was the image that told me what's what.



I placed my assembly into the gun house drawing and kept moving parts of it around until the ducting cleared the guns and nestled into the I-beam.





I scaled it .021, exported as an .STL file and loaded it into the slicer. My first setup used a 100% raft coverage area. The Tall aspect on that little raft started failing about 1/3 through the print. I could see it detaching from the build plate since the plate has risen enough to be clear of the resin level in the vat. I stopped the print knowing it would just be a waste of resin.



I redesigned the arrangement with a more substantial raft. I am having no problem with build plate adhesion and blamed the strange setup for the lost of attachment.



This will off the machine later tonight so I won't know if it's good until tomorrow. Once the ventilation is squared away, I'm going to dig into all the electro-hydraulics in the gun house, and then onto the ready reserve room below. With exposure change, I'm much more confident about fine details and small piping rendering nicely. I may reprint some of the more dubious parts I've produced so far. I haven't glued or painted anything yet so it's just time and some resin.

And thank you. Just when I thought I had it nailed down last night, I tried the drawing again in the turret, and this time viewed it from a different angle and found this...





I had to re-configure the ducting that entered the handling space below. It had to clear the gun, all framing girders and enter the space through the center ring. What I came up with worked, but I have no idea how accurate it is. Ryan's pics don't show this particular duct. I also took the time to draw the blower system and set it up to print as a single assembly. The new printer settings are working perfectly and I had a lot of confidence that all of the parts would render.





The print is done and mostly cleaned up. I may still have some trouble with the upper outlet pipe. I may be interfering with the right gun's curved shield space. Everything printed perfectly, nothing warped or broken and all the bolt heads showed up.



Now I just have to figure how to shoehorn this into the model during the build...

Wow.

If I could giver you a double bacon I would.

Good one, man, even the parts looks smoother on the surface. Maybe I should do the same exercise, calibrate and runs an exposure test

Great work so far!

I'll take a single bacon...

Work progresses...

I designed the Training Gear hydraulic plant. This sits down between the girders on the gun house's right side behind the Trainer's seat and regulator. Luckily this one is drawn in profile in one of the cross-section images I found so I could get the profiles down. I've scaled these drawings so they are representing correct lateral dimensions.

There are two output shafts that extend out of the end and I probably will make these out of correctly sized wire. It was gratified after finishing the drawing that it fit perfectly in the space it was supposed to. I have an add-on that facilitates making those neat curved edges. Also, SU is pretty easy to draw complicated pipe runs once you know what you're doing with connecting lines and adding curves to them.



Here it is dropped into position.



Next up will be to design this units hydraulic counterpart, the Elevation Gear Hydraulic Plant.

As in the big gun's turret, all the systems are driven by hydraulic motors with the pressure generated in a remote motor/pump setup. In the case of the big gun, the motor/pump (A-end) was physically remote from the hydraulic motor (B-end), but in the case of this smaller turret complex, the motor/pump was directly in line with it's b-end hydraulic motor.

With my newly refined printer setup, I have no doubt that all that delicate piping will render. It should look pretty good.

The Elevation Pump/Motor Hydraulic System shares the same motor/gear box/reservoir with the Training System. The output end is completely different and the units are mirror-images of each other. But having successfully crafted the one, drawing the other went quickly. Both just came off the printer and, with the new exposure settings, the detail is exceptional and all the piping is intact and tough. I'm very happy with these results and it tells me that anything I can draw for this project with print as I want it.







I'm now wrestling with the human interface portion of these systems, the pointer's and trainer's regulators. These, like the rest of this job, are not easy to visualize or draw. All the pictures I have are persepective images and therefore, I can draw directly on them. There are very few surfaces that are parallel to the SketchUp axes, and many of the corners and junctions are rounded/curved. None of this makes it an easy SU drawing project, but I will persist. Ryan Syzmanski is enjoying seeing all these components separated from the complexity of the insides of the turret.

I'll post the finished parts tomorrow.

If you can 3D print these detailed parts out into hard material parts, to me it will be amazing.

Looks great so far!

Back to the ship.

My first prints of the elevation and training pump systems was okay, but a couple of details didn't form and it bugged me. Here's the first attempt.



You probably can't find the errors, but I know they were there. I tried them on to see how they looked sitting in the framing. And they looked swell.


When I went back and evaluated the support scheme, I found that I misplaced the tiny support on the upper side of the detail, not the bottom-facing apex. This caused the detail to not form correctly until the build reached where the support was. This is support skills 101: the support goes at the bottom-most point what would start to form and create an island. There's a moving line in the slicer that helps you identify this contact point. In this case, I missed it a bit.

When I repositioned the errant supports I got a really nice print. I also moved some supports or made them smaller where they were difficult to remove without damaging the model.



Those piping details are very, very fine. The phos-bronze wire is showing where the links are going to connect to the regulating pedestal. They will not be this long. I pre-"drilled" the holes in the drawing so I could easily open them up with a 0.032" drill.

The new setting is amazing. It's like learning to 3D print all over again. I'm also reprinting the foot rungs since the new setting will make a truer and stronger part, plus a less warped base that I'm using as a drill jig.

Gosh, they look good.

Great work so far!