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

Looks great so far!

Best wishes to you and your wife for her chemotherapy.

It's beating the hell out of her! She contracted a urinary tract infection which is directly the result of chemo reduction of the immune system. Her blood counts have been okay, but she's totally wiped out with weakness, lightheadedness, and just general feeling awful. This is only to garner another 3% of 10-year survivability over the surgerical intervention. We're thinking seriously about not going forward with additional treatments. The cure seems worse than the illness. She has no active cancers anywhere. The adjuvant treatment is just to catch rouge cells from causing trouble.

While providing direct nursing care, I been sitting on the other end of the sofa and drawing away and did some 3D printing. I printed the upper hoists while I'm still working with Ryan on getting as much detail as possible about the lower ones and their enigmatic hoist trunks. I printed open hatches, and another attempt at the one cicuit panel wall. The first one had some annoying drawing/printing errors that I didn't need to keep. Lastly, I printed a new door wall with the tapered opening and improved locking pads. This one came out 1/16" shorter than the other wall. I don't know why, unless the entire handling room height changed in one of my iterations of the shape. I'll reprint a correct one. I felt that was a more elegant solution than grafting on a 1/16" strip.

As before, the printer is working like dynamite. Whateve I want, no matter how tiny, it's reprouducing. This is how I'm putting them on the machine. I have all their rafts touching so the entire group pops off the Wham-Bam sprint plate as a single part. Makes it easier to clean and fish the parts out of the alcohol baths. I then put the who deal under the post-cure lights and then trim and finish.






Notice how thin the fine support connectors are. They look like they shouldn't work, but they do and they're small enough to not damage tiny details during their removal. As fine as the supports are, they aren't breaking during the print. They break when I want to remove them. Before I recalibrating, I was losing the small supports all the time.

In this view you can see how smooth the walls are. I'm printing at 0.04mm layer height and it shows no layer lines. It's what many non-3D printing folks worry about with this technology.



Here are the cleaned, but not perfectly… hoists. The powder hoist is in the open position with a powder cartridge ready to be removed and the projectile hoist is in the closed position. You can actually make out the tiny screw clampos that hold down the lid when stowed.



Here's a vignette with the projectile hoist in relation to the circuit box wall.



Lastly, here are the new doors. The big one is for the handling room and the little one is the cartridge chute, one of which I'm going to pose open. The hinge attachment points are very fragile and I'm trying to visualize how to attach (and when).



One of my dear friends and astoundingly amazing model builders, Chris Bowling, explained how to spray paint outside in colder weather by heating the rattle can paint in a bowl of hot water for about 5 - 10 minutes to warm it. It works well. I may have to resort to this since all these parts need priming before color coats and it's been too cold outside to do it. I don't paint solvent-based paints in the shop and don't (yet) have a spray booth. I'm vascilating between wanting to splurg on a 40w solid-state laser cutter or a decent spray booth. Actually, you need positive venting of the laser cutter since they produce some bad fumes too.

I drew another little detail. This is the manual sight sitting on the gun house roof that's used by the gun captain occasionally. It's really old-school, using some wheels and metal cables to transmitt the optical position selected by the captain to manual readouts next to the trainer's and pointer's stations. It would be the sight of last resort if all the power was out. It's a very fragile assembly so I had to beef it up a lot so it would hold together as a printed part. Ideally, it would be nice to do it in photo-etch, but I don't have that capability, and don't want it due to the nature of the chemistry you need.



To increase the odds that it will hold together I chose to print this, along with the captain's hood with the rear gun house roof piece. I had originally made the roof out of styrene, but didn't like how the hatch hole came out so re-doing was in order anyway. It's printing now and will be done in about an hour.



I don't think I'll be daft enough to actually attempt to wire up the mechanism in the gun house ceiling. It would be hard to view and even harder to build.

I'll display this print tomorrow.

Great work so far!

Here's how it turned out.





It's slightly oversized in my estimation, but at least a person can make out all of the geometry. The roof is not glued to the back…. it's just sitting there for the picture. Printing the parts directly from the drawing that created them helps insure that the fit is essentially… perfect.

I still had a error in the hood assembly that I forgot to correct. The lower clevis on the counter-balance cylinder wasn't actually integral with the cylinder and when the support was removed it just fell off. Some careful drilling with a 0.022" carbide drill and wire of the same diameter fixed the problem permanently.

I also gave up on trying to open up the cartridge hatch on the drawing… causing way too much agita. I just cut it out old-school. My cut went a little wide, but was fixed with some Bondic. Bondic, being the same chemistry as the UV, makes a permanent and strong bond with the resin. It sands the same, and when painted, is invisible. To hold the little door hinges to the wall I will also pin them. This time with something even finer (0.012")



All these added doors will be very easy to break off during handling. I'm still fretting over just when to install them.

I'm not only awestruck at you design skills in creating these parts but also at the abilities of the 3D printing, its mind boggling to this old codger.

I am an old codger… heading to 79. There was a CBS Sunday Morning segment on Eddie Goldfard, a toy designer with 800 patents to his name. He's still designing, has a complete machine shop and does 3D printing. He's 102! Old age is a state of mind (and arthritis). Once I decided I wasn't going to stop innovating and learning I didn't. I thought I was hot stuff learning and mastering 3D printing in my late 70s, until I saw the story about Eddie. That humbled me a bit. And I am constantly amazed at what this technology is enabling me to create. Right now I'm working on the last part of major 3D design, the lower hoist systems. I'll post when I have it done.

Looks great so far!

Here's the two lower hoists that are in the magazine.

It amazes me constantly!

Here's some more eye candy. I've got the two lower hoists almost finalized. Still waiting on a couple more images from Ryan to get some of the piping detail more accurate. Right now a lot of it is my imagination running wild. Getting the angles of departure for the ammo trunks that go up to the the Upper Handling Room was difficult and could be wrong. I took the angle directly from the pictures taken by Ryan of the sides of the more vertical one. The tilted one, is more of a guess. I've asked Ryan for a direct side shot of both sides so I could confirm the angularity and the piping details.






After rendering the below, I made that door latching lever smaller, as you can see in the above image. Tilting it back changed a lot of the lower geometry and took a while to carete.


hink they're too

I think they're too tall. Ryan measured them at 6 feet or so, but with the base I made it seems to high.
These units with all their detailed glory with sit on the port side wall of the magazine and have their backs to the viewing public in the way that I've envisioned the display. Ryan I are discusing how else to display it so both front and back details will be viewable. One possibility is having the back as a mirror. Another would be displaying it where all sides can be viewed. To be decided.

Next up are the hydraulic pumps on steel stands which are much more pedestrian that these things were… and… they're both the same. Only diffirence is where they lie vis a vis that hoist themselves.

Great work so far!

To nestle Upper Handling Room's floor to the sides I had to do some minor surgery to remove some of the corner glue strips from the walls as shown in these images. The choice was to trim the floor of the wall. I Chose the wall.


The walls now fit nicely.

Printing the hoists is halfway done. It would be "all the way" done, except the slanted one had some fatal print errors that I traced back to fatal drawing errors. When I went about removing some internal faces that were making the part more complicated, I also eliminated some of the external details and didn't realize this until I tried printing it.



The little lugs that protrude from the door are really, REALLY, tiny! And they printed just about perfectly. I need to be careful in future handling and painting so I don't remove them.



The slanted hoist wasn't so lucky. One of the critical side details didn't print at all because the part in the drawing wasn't connected to the main surface. Also the entire hoist chamber filled with resin, whereas it did not do this on the vertical one. I did some major internal surgery to attempt to preventing it happening again. I will attempt to print it again tonight.



This is interesting (at least to me). I did a wire pass-through test to see if the wireway in the upper projectile hoist was sufficiently large to pass the two-lead power that will feed the gun house lighting. It worked! BTW: This is the same place that the wiring goes through on the 1:1 mount.



My old friend, Bryant Mitchell, (the fella who's building the wood base for this and the big gun models, suggested making an electronic "tour guide" of the model showing closeups of those details that won't be available to the viewer. This idea has immense possibility. Having the model so people can walk around it makes it difficult to get power for the lighting. Having against a wall blocks viewing anything that's facing rearward. Having a the back plane of the case being a mirror could work, but doubles the viewing distance. When I brought this idea to Ryan he immediately thought of those digital picture frames. I have to find out more about what they need, but making the photoplay wouldn't be a problem for me. I could caption each frame describing what they're seeing. The images would only be of the model and maybe some exterior shots of the guns on the New Jersey. It's great to have more than my mind on this project.

Amazing.

Thank you!

Thought I was going to paint today. It was almost 60°, but I got involved in a lot of prep work prior to paint. Things like ladder rungs open and closed hatches needed to be in place before paint so I wouldn't screw anything up after painting.

I started by finishing up the curved rear mount wall. I removed the printed-on rungs, which were either missing or very beaten up. I made a drill jig out of the base used to support the print. There were three on each side that needed adding. I pilot drilled with a tiny one, and then opened the holes up with a #55 drill. CA plus hardener holds them in place.


Then I had to decide "to add the door or not add the door"… that is the question. I chose to add, even though this makes this part much more fragile. If I didn't add it, I would have risked really messing up the finish. I tried first to glue it with Bondic, but Bondic's downfall is the UV curing light must reach ALL of the resin. No light, no cure! Since the hinge plates were opaque, the Bondic wasn't working. I resorted to med CA with accelerator.

Before applying I had to replace all the broken off door dog handles with 0.020" phos-bronze wire. I had to put handles on the movable and fixed doors and the rear of the fixed door, which may or may not be visible when complete.



And with the fixed door finished.



It's not quite done yet. i still have The mount sides needed lots of foot rungs.

It was here where the drill jig really worked. When I drew the parts, I spaced them at the correct spacing for the project. After clipping off the parts, I drilled the holes at the junction spots.



I also added the telescope hoods. I'm having the pointer's hood in the open position and the sight checker's in closed. The sight checker only did his job during training actions.



There's an open door in this wall also, but gluing it in place now would block being able to paint behind it. That's going to have to wait till the paint is on.