Toy Train Tracks

thingiverse

These are a section of straight train track. They click together quite nicely, my kids have gotten a kick out of them. I am working on train wheels and cars that can go on them (early prototype of this in photo). Certainly not as robust as the keyhole style wooden trains they usually play with, but quite unique and fun none the less. I've been amazed at how well/fast these print out on my Makerbot Thing-o-matic, even on a very bumpy automated build platform they come out well, the ones in the photos are straight off the printer, no cleanup needed, some tips on that below. Hope to make some curved sections in the future. I drew this stuff in Sketchup and then exported to the stl file. Just did a full train set, you should check it out here if you like these tracks: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:11101 Instructions I print these using raftless printing configured basically how they describe on the makerbot wiki (http://wiki.makerbot.com/thingomatic-doc:raftless). The modifications I made are: 1) I changed the Object First Layer Feed Rate Infill Multiplier (ratio) to be 0.5 2) I change the Object First Layer Feed Rate Permieter Multiplier (ratio) to 0.5 3) I changed the Object First Layer Flow Rate Multiplier (ratio) to 0.9 4) I disabled the Outline feature and generally delete the lines of gCode that do the warm up extrusion. These changes make the first layer go down slower and a little wider/thicker so that it adheres to the platform very well. I was noticing that the outline and warm-up extrusion generally left buggers or lines of plastic that then caused the early layers to peal off. The changes above fixed that. Update: 9/18/2011 Just uploaded all the other versions of this train track. They are available with my toy train set, but figured I'd give the original track I loaded a little "lov'in" and at least make this a complete track set. Update: 9/24/2011 Just loaded new files for the straight and curved track that are a lot cleaner. Got rid of reversed faces and a bunch of holes that might have caused issues for people.