Maud takes the Bike to Faringe train station, where she works as a train attendant and assists the passengers with boarding and finding their seats. She neatly parks her bike, in the racks outside the station, before clocking in and getting started.
The Bike is a creation caused by a misunderstanding. A model train enthusiast from Denmark reached out and asked if I could create a "skinne-cykel". Cykel means bike in Swedish and I didn't really pay any attention to the prefix "skinne". Eager, and admittedly flattered to be asked for a design, I got started. Soon a draft was ready and shared as a "Work in progress" on Thingiverse for a first review.
The Danish model train enthusiast said something like "Nice…but I meant a draisine…." in a polite way.
So a draisine (or railbike) was created and made thick enough to be printed with FDM (Fused Deposition Modeling) printers and PLA filament.
In general it's best practice to print models before uploading them to Thingiverse. Therefor the Bike model remained a forgotten "work in progress" for some time, while waiting to be updated in a thicker and printable form. However, suddenly the unexpected happened, the Bike was printed with SLA (Stereolithography) printers.
FDM with PLA filament is less toxic and less messy than using SLA printers and Resin. However, when you want details like in 1:87 scale modeling, SLA is outstanding. The print below is amazing!
https://twitter.com/josefprusa/status/1176473042098298881?s=20
The spokes are 0,2 mm wide and not a single one is broken!
A promise was made in the first upload of the bike, that there would later be a womens bike version once the male version was printed. Since even Joseph Prusa himself printed the Bike, the promise had to be fulfilled. Also a recent request regarding a back rack, front basket and bell was added. The last additions are not yet proved to be printable so eagerly hoping someone with an SLA printer can verify them.
Design challenges
Miniatures are very forgiving since you can't really add much details and some of your minor mistakes will not show when printed anyway. Back when I designed the bike I wasn't yet able to create bends in different planes in Onshape, so the steering wheel posed a tricky problem. It is bent in multiple dimensions which always makes things harder when using basic programs like Microsoft's 3D builder. This is yet another example on how also as a beginner, with some creativity, can use the simplest shapes and make something appreciated.
The steering wheel is actually created by combining multiple bends which were really "quarters" of a ring shape. The bends were then rotated in space to get the right angles for a steering wheel. The joints were however sadly visible since I also dragged the the bends slightly and the end surface areas didn't fit together perfectly after that. To solve that problem the steering wheel was imported into Meshmixer and smooth was carefully applied to the joints.
If you look very carefully you can see one of those small mistakes, however not noticeable in a printed miniature, as mentioned above. The cylinder diameter is slightly less exactly at the joints. The smooth wasn't perfectly applied, but…this will not show in the printed versions unless you scale the model up in extreme.
The saddle was also created by adding a "saddle like" model to meshmixer and using draw commands.