How not to loose control over your traction cars

CCCo Wooden Combine: Northern Indiana (green) and Terre Haute (red)

3D drawing is computer drawing. This means that you will meet a point where things will get out of control if you can no longer track all the trunks of your project properly. I am there...

3D printing is a tricky affair, and a minor error in one of the hundreds (or thousands) of elements will make the whole file unusable.

So I put things in order and separated the Cincicinnati Car Co.Wooden Combine into several parts :

- A common base used for all variations (grey)
- An additional pack for one given version (green, red, ...)

Now I have merged the Terre Haute version (red) and the Northern Indiana version (green) in one master file. For one print project, the common base (grey) plus one individual package is exported into an STL file. On both showed versions, the side walls, the clerestory windows, the pilot, the rear roof mat and the chimney are not the same or missing. As this car was built or rebuilt to so many versions for Indiana and Ohio lines, several dozen individual packs or sub packs could be generated.

This technique not only applies for the carbody, but also to the underframes, who had different arrangements.