Monday, April 09, 2007

Handrails


handrail
Originally uploaded by Phil_Parker.
One of the more challenging jobs on any steam locomotive is fitting of boiler handrails. There is very little to beat a wonky set for ruining the look of a model and you can’t hide bad workmanship.

In theory all you do is drill the pre-marked holes, bend a bit of 0.45mm brass wire, slip the handrail knobs on and affix to the model.

The reality is loads of frustrating messing around trying to get the bends in the right place. The knobs are never the right length (people who use split pins instead don’t have this problem but I don’t get on with them) and where are the holes in the boiler supposed to go ?

This kit had some markings for the holes. The rest I had to measure. This wasn’t too bad although more by luck than judgement.

The wire bending started in the middle. I formed the curve around a series of round things such as bottles and pens. Plugging it into the front middle fixing gave me the position for the corners. After this things were suprisingly easy. Fixing was carried out with tiny amounts of low melt solder and lots of flux.

This job is one of those that goes well or badly. No middle ground. This time I was lucky, or if you prefer, very skilful.

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