A Small Distraction
On a whim on Monday I decided that I would actually just build something - not anything with any particular purpose or greater project in mind but just something I fancied doing. So, what you will see now is a Ruston 16/20 taking shape in 1/35th. If one of my more outlandish schemes we to ever see the light of day I would need a few of these so I guess it is a sort of dry run. I have recently tried and failed to fit a chip and a stay alive into a KB Scale Ruston LBT so thought that given the extra space of going up a scale or two this would not be a problem. I have not really thought about how this will be powered yet but there is a possibility it could become my first radio controlled loco.
I have a Slaters 1/32nd that has been knocking around in a part built state for a long time so in the absence of any drawings I used this to scale down from. Construction is very traditional so far being mostly from nickel silver sheet with a bit of brass tube but I have used a few techniques for the first time and am learning a lot from this one.
I set off with building a set of frames from 18 thou sheet as I didn't have any brass angle of the correct size. Cutting all the metal has been made much easier now that I have the guillotine and using the gauge blocks makes this even easier. I have also used the gauge blocks to mark out many of the pieces for the rivets and windows - much quicker and more accurate than with a ruler alone - at least when I use a ruler!
Another thing I have made a lot of use of are some small steel set squares and magnets to hold pieces true while soldering - the rather poor photo may explain but I am sure you can work out what I did.
Usually, where I need two identical pieces exactly the same I will solder two, or more, pieces together and then drill / file all the pieces together. I always get too carried away with the solder though and have a nightmare trying to separate the pieces. This time however I tried something different and used double sided tape to fix the pieces and seems to have worked.
Something else that came into it's own was the little chop saw as I was able to slice less than 1mm off a piece of tube to form the round window surround. After soldering this on I just drilled the aperture and used a fret saw to remove the rest and finishing off with a half round file to get a lovely round window. As I have no plans to copy out and cut up as templates for where the rivets should go. for the first time I fitted the
slide onto the GW rivet press. It took a bit of practice but am pretty pleased with the resulting rivets although it did seem to take ages to do. It would also have been much easier if I had not done the window first.
As always after soldering, everything had a few minutes in the ultrasonic cleaner which is great at getting flux residue off and so after two fairly lengthy sessions, here we have about half of a Ruston body. So far everything has been pretty tradition but there are a few parts coming up where I think I shall be putting my fledgling CAD skills to use.
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