Ever since starting in model railroading, I have like large industry on a layout. Of course, my meaning may be a bit different than you may think. I like my structures to be proportional to the railroad models. What I mean by this is they have to have the look and feel of the real thing. Those of you that have read my blog have undoubtedly seen my model of an ADM facility. This structure dwarfs the rolling stock on the layout, just as it does in real life.

Those of you the read my previous posts know I was looking for structures to occupy a corner of the layout that represented an industrial area at the west end of Wyocena yard. I had a Walther’s building that I had kit bashed long ago an was going to use it as a brewery. However, it just didn’t feel right. I had some old Hamm’s beer cans I was going to use at the facility so I started searching online for photos of an actual Hamm’s facility.

I found a photo of the Hamm’s brewery in San Francisco which had a large billboard on the top with a 3-dimensional beer glass.  You can see the original on the  SF Chronicle web site. At night, rows of light would light sequentially make if look as though the glass was filling with beer. Of course, this sign overlooked the San Francisco Giants baseball field so it undoubtedly made plenty of baseball fans thirsty.

Both the brewery structure and the billboard were perfect for the corner of my layout. The structure itself used methods of construction that are fairly normal in building structures and I won’t get into that in this article, but oh that billboard, would it be neat if I could light it like the real thing?

I started by searching for a 3d model of a beer glass but couldn’t find a suitable model, at least models for which I was willing to pay the price. I did find some nice photos of beer glasses that I could use to create my own 3D model. The glass is a bit more modern than the original but I am not trying to create exact duplicate. The original beer glass was 13 feet high and 18 feet in diameter where mine scales out at 26.5 feet tall and 17.5 feet in diameter.

The glass was drawn using the photo of the beer glass [1]. The outline of the galls was created using the arc tools of the CAD application.

Notice that only half of the glass was created. The object is then turned into a plane, and in 3D mode, the spiral too is used on the Y-Axis to turn the plane into a 3D object 

Although I won’t detail it here, the holes in the surface of the glass for the LEDs was does by making a series of rods in a 360-degree array, these rods were then made to be a single solid. A vertical array of this object was made to form each row of holes. Each of the objects was then subtracted from the beer glass resulting in holes in the surface of the glass.  I adjusted the shape of the object to more resemble the beer glass on the brewery prior to making the holes.

Now comes the fun part, lighting the glass. My original plan was to use small LEDs in the holes around the glass. This would have needed 285 LEDs and resulted in twice the wires. After a while I deemed this impossible just from a wiring aspect. I then ran across some fiber optic strands on Amazon that would fit and cut down the number of LEDs to 19, one for each row.

The installation of the fiber was definitely a learning process. After a number of pulled out fibers and one broken glass, I learned to leave an inch or two of fiber on the out side of the glass and not to heat shrink each rows fiber until I have all the fiber installed.

At this point I have about half of the fiber installed, once done, I will do the shrink wrap and trim the excess fiber.

In the previous photo you can see the top of the support structure for the billboard. Although you could make the billboard frame from styrene, I elected to use the 3D printer to produce the parts, the following photos show the billboard frame parts and the frame before painting (minus the billboard).

In the next part of this series I will concentrate on the wiring of the electronics to animate the glass and of course the actual billboard that gets installed on the framework.

Happy Railroading

Greg