Railway wheel generator

This is openSCAD code that can be used to generate a variety of various railway wheels.

Included are some images and sample wheel stls. All the samples are 1/32 fine scale renders. All have been rendered for fine details ($fn=200) other than the Mansell wheel which was rendered with $fn=100 to keep the size of the stl reasonable.

The code can also produce standard wheels in both 1/32 and 10mm scales. Also supported are 3.5in and O gauge by selected the correct "sf" value in the code. The code could be extended to support other scales.

All have been designed to be able to be printed on a FDM printer with the inside of the wheel to the build plate. Most, but not all will need some sort of support, the Mansell type wheel, having details on the back is probably the most difficult to print.

The mk1Coach wheel makes a rather crude attempt to model the curved shape of the wheel face, but this really needs a rewrite to create a proper profile.

It is suggested that if you want to run the openSCAD code that a recent development snapshot of openSCAD should be used as the rendering will be much faster than the official release version which as the time of writing dates back to 2021.

See Adrians openSCAD tuturial if you are not sure what it is...  https://www.g1-3d.uk/guides/openSCAD-tutorial

Sell: https://openscad.org/downloads.html#snapshots

The code is licenced under the Creative Common Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike CC BY-NC-SA.

Version 1.2:

• Added split spoke type based on RCH drawing 1024 (rch1024.pdf).
• Added the ability to specify the number of holes and hole diameter for "hole" wheels.
• File names are now versioned to stop the website from arbitarily renaming them.
• Minor changes and bug fixes.

Version 1.1:

• Added the RCH pressed steel 3 hold wagon wheel as an options. The profile is reasonably accurate other than a couple of liberties taken to make it easy to design and print. This is based on the 10,12,14 ton wheel on the drawing RCH drawing rch1042.pdf dated August 1934.