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HMS AE2 Model – Update
From Thor Lund and Dr Roger Neill, Friends of the Holbrook Submarine Museum
During the AE2 Webinar the Friends of the Holbrook Submarine Museum held in March 2021 and in the subsequent ‘Silent ANZAC Expeditions’ book published in early 2022, Roger Neill included a digital model of the AE2 he and colleagues had been intermittently working on for several years and intended for display at the Holbrook Submarine Museum. Despite the fact the model was quite incomplete, a number of folks mentioned this may be a great candidate for 3D printing a physical display piece for the museum. We quickly established that, while the existing digital model would represent a good starting point, it would need to be completely re-worked to produce a display piece of appropriate fidelity. In late 2021 Roger began re-working the digital model and, three years later, it has just been completed.
The final cutaway covers the portion of the boat between the two watertight bulkheads. This model, illustrated below, is built up from a series of digital ‘objects’. An object can be very simple, such as a hexagonal representation of a bolt head, or it can be very complex, such as a worm drive gear. Every object is built up using a series of vertices. A bolt head has 14 vertices, a typical worm gear would have 1200 or more.
The cutaway, as of this week, has a total of 4774 individual objects, built up out of 4,346,453 vertices.
3D Printing the cutaway model
We started printing the internal components in May 2022. Initially we printed stand-alone items such as tables etc., but as the model matured, we started printing more integrated items such as pipework, drive shafts etc. In the first instance we had one small domestic printer. We have since added two larger units, which we are using to print the hull. Because the three printers are domestic units we are treating them very gently, printing at 60% of their nominal maximum print rate. While this has made it a slow process, the quality of the prints are excellent, and the units have proven quite reliable. To date we have printed all the internal components and just shy of 50% of the hull. The statistics are that, to date, we have consumed 61.4 kg of filament, and, between them, the three machines have been operating for 12,945 hours (that’s 539 days!). We estimate the hull sections will complete printing early in 2025 and then painting and assembly.
The finished model will be a little over 2m long and weigh over 80kgs. Our current parallel project involves an interactive AI system for visitors to our AE2 exhibits.
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