Update on 03.25.2021: When working on the upcoming switch I noticed some artifacts in the curved rails which were created through moving the profile sketch in FreeCad. When printed, these were unnoticeable. As I was correcting these, I noticed that the radius for the outer rail was slightly higher than it was supposed to, what was the cause of a progressively developing gap between adjacent inner rails, which I noticed during testing, but ascribed to inaccuracy during printing. This should be corrected now, too, so individual track segments should better fit together.
A curved segment of the 35mm-gauge rail track system, originally developed for the YT-01 locomotive (and hopefully its successors, at some point). The 35 millimeter designation refers to the distance between the centers of the rail profiles. The curved segment covers an arc of 22,5 degrees of a 500mm-radius circle. The radius is measured from the center of the inner rail.
The track comprises four basic elements which are printed separately: sleepers, clamps, rails and connectors.
Assembly instructions:
snap-in two clamps into a sleeper with their print-baseplate side facing in the same direction.
Take two rails (an inner and an outer one) and push them inside the gaps of the clamps with the print-baseplate-facing side of the clamps pointed away from the tracks, until the rail is stopped by the baseplate-contact residue. Now firmly push the rail until it cuts through the residue and then slide the sleeper in the desired position.
I use 7 sleepers per track segment, but the sleeper density is entirely up to you.
Finally slip on two track connectors at one end of the segment onto the rails. This time, push the rail into the print baseplate-facing side of the connectors, otherwise the friction of the length of the connector combined with the resistance of the residue will require excessive force which could damage the track and/or the connector.
Enjoy!
| clamp.stl |
| railR500-22.5deg_Inner.stl |
| railR500-22.5deg_Outer.stl |
| rail_link.stl |
| sleeper.stl |
