Kritik sah

The Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR)’s T1 class is famous for many reasons: being enormous, being a duplex, possibly having beaten Mallard’s speed record while no one was looking… and being in production in the 21st century. That last fact is down to the redoubtable work by the PRR T1 Steam Locomotive Trust , who continued their efforts to reproduce an example of these remarkable and lamentably unpreserved locomotives in the year 2025. They say that 2025 was “the year of the frame” because the frame was finally put together. We might say that for the PRR Trust, this was the year of welding. Back when the Baldwin and Altoona works were turning out the originals, the frames for steam locomotives were cast, not welded. There might not be anywhere on Earth to get a 64′ long (19.5 m), 71,000 lbs steel casting made these days. Building it up with welded steel might not be perfectly accurate, but it’s the sort of hack that’s needed to keep the project moving. The cylinders, too, would have been...

Between the news, the world situation, and the inevitable family stresses that come this time of year, well — one could be excused for feeling a certain amount of envy for those adorable pocket monsters who spend their time hidden away in red-and-white orbs. [carlos3dprint] evidently did, but he didn’t just dream of cozy concave solitude: he made it happen, with 3D printing and way too much post-processing. Arguably 3D printing is not the ideal technique for such a large build, and even [carlos], despite the 3dprint in his handle, recognized this: the base frame of the sphere is CNC-routed plywood. He tried to use Styrofoam to make a skin, but evidently he’d lost access to the large CNC cutter he’d borrowed for the plywood frame at that point, as he was trying to do the cuts by hand. It still seems like it wouldn’t have be any worse than the little printed blocks from four different printers he eventually hot-stapled into a shell. We only say that because based on his description of...