This article was taken from the June 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
When Chris Thorpe was eight years old, holidaying with his family in Wales, he fell in love. Her name was Princess, and she was a steam engine.
Built in 1863 for the Welsh quarries, Princess ran on a smaller track than passenger lines. "Narrow-gauge railways began to capture my imagination," says Thorpe, now 44 and based in Oxford. "They're really unsung but they kicked off the industrial revolution." But then the love affair hit a snag. Thorpe liked making models of trains, but whereas there were plenty of sets of famous engines such as The Flying Scotsman, nobody sold them for ones like Princess. "It frustrated me as I got older," he says.
In January, Thorpe set up The Flexiscale Company to 3D-print models of more obscure trains that are important to enthusiasts. First, users vote for what they'd like to own. Next, if Thorpe is able to raise sufficient Kickstarter finance, he scans the real engine using LIDaR (light-detection and ranging), and in return, the train's owners get the resulting data for nothing -- effectively a catalogue of printable spare parts -- and a donation.
The process creates a pixel cloud "mesh" of the object, accurate to 0.2mm, which is divided into parts and 3D printed using resin. At 16-micron resolution, every detail and dent in the original is represented. Finally, Thorpe sells them as Airfix-style kits at a range of scales: from £35 up to £200 for bigger versions. Call it the long tail of railway modelling.
For Thorpe, there's poetry in all this. He is using the tools of the current industrial revolution -- additive manufacturing -- to recreate the very machines that brought about the first.
This month, the initial Princess models get printed.
And Thorpe and his beloved will be together at last.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
