Giles Favell
Front tank
At this point the exercise has been a purely academic one, having printed all the main body parts, printable in 4mm or 7mm……
That changed when I recently bought a ComMarker B4 50w laser. This is a Fibre laser (Galvo – which means it flashes the laser beam around by using two moving mirrors, not by mounting the laser head on a gantry beam as is the usual). This is a desktop machine, extremely bad for the eyes (so I have it fully enclosed in a box, like Schrodinger Cat) but will very happily burn its way through brass, nickel silver, steel, silver, steel…. with amazing precision and finesse (0.3mm diameter holes through 0.6 sheet? No problem).
On test, I’ve managed to cut through 2mm brass, and it could be persuaded to do more – but that is not what the machine is really good at, which is 1mm and under, where it is superb.
This means that chassis, rods and valve gear are no longer the nightmare that they were. I made some nameplates for one of my locos
And some 4mm GWR number plates
