Thomas turntable replacement track

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jsc
Posts: 1864
Joined: Thu Apr 10, 2014 4:00 am

Thomas turntable replacement track

Post by jsc » Tue Jul 19, 2016 6:57 pm

Somehow my son has acquired an enormous volume of Thomas the Tank Engine play sets. One(!) of his roundhouse turntables is missing the track portion. Most fortunately, I had an extra one to copy, or it would have been much work to duplicate the gearing.

Some interesting things from this project:
Once again, Ed's chord equation page comes in handy. I always find it easier to look up his page than to open up the Pocket Ref sitting on my desk: https://softsolder.com/2013/08/02/makin ... -equation/

The little spike that extends out the end of the slide on a caliper can be used as a depth gauge, to take the measurement of otherwise impossible dimensions.

A round peg will snap fit into a circumscribed hexagon of the exact same diameter, no fudge factor required.

If you're drawing 99 gear teeth into a sketch using a circular pattern in Fusion 360, try to make sure all your other features are in place, constrained and dimensioned, before you do the teeth, otherwise subsequent operations on that sketch will take a really long time for some reason.

You can just barely print an object 173mm wide using the right extruder on a dual extruder setup if you offset the print to the right by 32mm.

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1680666
Attachments
base-bottoms.jpg
assembled.jpg
arches.jpg

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Jules
Posts: 3144
Joined: Wed Jan 21, 2015 1:36 am

Re: Thomas turntable replacement track

Post by Jules » Tue Jul 19, 2016 7:02 pm

Whoa! That's a lot of teeth! Great job! :lol:

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tks546
Posts: 43
Joined: Thu May 05, 2016 4:20 am
Location: Springfield, Illinois

Re: Thomas turntable replacement track

Post by tks546 » Thu Jul 21, 2016 1:26 pm

Nice job! That's the kind of thing I love having a 3d printer around for.
The other day our dog broke the bracket that holds her dish to the side of her crate. Within a couple hours I made a replacement part and the dish was back in place.

-Tom

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