Hello

One of the things I decided to do with the cattle dock was to make the railings just like the real thing and feed the bars through the posts. In an earlier post somewhere I made up a little jig so I could drill the holes through the posts at the correct spacing. It was all designed to use 0.5mm square posts and 0.3mm round wire for the railings.

To start with I thought plastic would be fine to use for the posts. 0.5mm square plastic is easy to get hold of plus the fact that its very easy to machine (drill) so I spent some time drilling plenty of posts out of plastic (styrene). The problems started when I tried to thread the posts onto the 0.3mm brass wire as I was loosing roughtly half the number of posts as they were breaking (a 0.35mm hole through a 0.5mm post doesnt leave much material left). The posts that I managed to thread onto the wire were fine until I tried using solvent to glue the posts in place, you can see the result below...

As you can see the posts distorted a bit so I needed to rethink how I make these. The solution I came to was that there was no reason why I couldnt use 0.5mm square brass instead of the plastic, so after a bit of trial and error (and a few broken drills!) I managed to drill some brass posts as shown below...

Although the brass was harder to drill the finished posts are much stronger than the plastic ones, plus once soldered the whole thing produces quite a ridgid fence.

I have learnt another lesson here, what might seem an easy option at the beginning might make things much harder later on!

Missy

P.S. You can also see quite well the laser engraved brickwork in the photos.

ADDITIONAL:

As requested here is the jig I have used to drill the posts, its looking a little tired now as I have drilled loads of posts using it. In hindsight it would have made more sense to make it out of something a little harder than PCB!

The 0.5mm square brass/plastic is a 'snug' fit into the slot on the right hand side, you can just make out the holes which are drilled down the center of the slot.

The two halves are then folded together to hold the square bar and the holes are drilled using a drill press to keep things nice and square. I think this is important as there is only 0.1mm left each side of the holes so things need to be square and true. Its not a perfect jig for the job but it has worked.

M.