OK, I've been working on the body today, putting the major bits in place and it's coming on well, I think. Just the roof to stick on in due course. I forgot to say previously, that in the interests of print quality and to allow a recess for glazing I removed the front and rear window frames from the cab front and rear panels and printed them separately, so I still have to add them on.
I have printed out 4 x 25mm disc wheels ready to fit, but pictures of Thomas the Tank Engine always show spoked wheels. Thinking about it this morning I remembered that a couple of years ago Simon Wood posted his OpenSCAD file to produce wheels of any type in any size. Fortunatly I managed to find Simon's post and downloaded his file and the OpenScad program. It's not something I've ever really played with before because the programming is waaaay beyond me but I did manage to deduce how to change the parameters in Simon's file and lo and behold, ended up with an stl file for a 10 spoke wheel.
![:D](./images/smilies/icon_biggrin.gif)
It probably would look better with more spokes but I doubt that the printer would cope. However, it also looked more like a wagon wheel than a loco wheels and then it dawned on me that balance weights would be needed. I can't see an option in Simon's file to incorporate them (?) so I imported the stl into SketchUp and added a nominal weight manually.
This picture shows the loco body so far, the roof, the backhead that I have mentioned before and 4 spoked wheels plus one disc for comparison.
![IMG_0403.jpg](./download/file.php?id=18983&sid=877e1767de3c909bcb149bc712c91b13)
- IMG_0403.jpg (424 KiB) Viewed 4230 times