Earlier this year in March I shared with you more of my designs for 3D printed replacement horns; you can read the post here.  I have now designed and test printed a few more and in this post I will share them with you.

My latest horn is a simple single chime horn intended to replace some missing ones on my set of Alco FA units.  The design, as pictured below, is fairly simple, consisting of a horn with a locating peg protruding from the underside.

These parts, as you might expect for N Scale, are very small and although they are printable the chance of them getting lost in the cleaning and shipping process at Shapeways is very high, so they have been added onto a sprue, making a set of 6.

They can be cut off the sprue just above the horizontal bar. There is a collar under the horn so that when the peg is fitted into a hole in the cab roof they won’t drop too far onto the locomotive.  As with all my horns they were designed to be printed in Shapeways Frosted Ultra Detail material.  However, now that Shapeways have introduced their Frosted Extreme Detail material I opted to get them printed in this.  The cost difference is small between FUD and FXD for such a small part but there is a longer wait time of 12 days for FXD; this is because it takes longer to print.  I believe the extra time is worth it as they have come out very well.  These only turned up in the mail today so they are still coated in the waxy residue, although I have noticed recently that Shapeways’ models seem to be less coated than they used to be which is a good thing.

These models are now in the Goo Gone for an overnight soak which will break down the waxy residue and turn the parts opaque.  Once removed and dried then they can be painted and fixed to my locomotives.  Just to give you an Idea of scale, below is a shot of the sprue of 6 on top of an N Scale Micro-Trains FT locomotive that’s also awaiting a new set of horns.

I know they look a bit odd still attached to the sprue but leaving them attached for now makes them much easier to fish out of the Goo Gone.

Now that I have four different types of replacement horns to offer it has become apparent to me that I need to change the way I have named them, particularly as I have some more designs coming soon as well.

So the new name will consist of 2 numbers separated by a dash. The first number will be the quantity of chimes on the horns and the second will be my model reference.

Here are all the horns I offer so far with their new identifying numbers:

Replacement Horns Type 1-1 (Available in a pack of 12)

Replacement Horns Type 3-1 (Available in a pack of 12 with 6 Type 3-1 & 6 Type 3-2)

Replacement Horns Type 3-2 (Available in a pack of 12 with 6 Type 3-1 & 6 Type 3-2)

Replacement Horns Type 3-3 (Available in a pack of 12)

They are available through the shop by clicking here or directly from Shapeways by clicking here.

This week’s delivery from Shapeways also contained some other new products which I plan to share with you next week.