Airfix 1/24 Spitfire

[JCote]

Thanks radu

[Klaus H]

this is some basolutely high end modelling! i am deeply impressed. whats your source of 0.1 and 0.2mm brass-sheet. i cant get such tight diameters here. in the shops i know they start from 0.5mm which is too thick for modelling purpose. i guess such sheets could be a very fine addition to the use of can and package aluminium i am using normally.

 

glad the toothpick trick workes for you. i guess you have rapidely reduced your lossrate on "screws".

 

your soldering is stunning. i have to get into metal work too. the results are top class. and to be honest... it is just way cooler to have parts made of metal than of plastic. even if they might look similar once they are assembled. its a bit crazy but thats the way most of us are here.

 

seeing this last update, i have to add one more progress report to my absolutely favourites here.

 

thanks for sharing that. would you mind telling how much such a lathe would cost about?

 

cheers klaus

[JCote]

Thanks for your kind words Klaus, though I have to say that what you, Radu and others achieve with plastic is tops in the coolness stakes. I started experimenting with brass in fact because I could never put plastic together to a decent standard, everything ended up rickety, asymmetric and out-of-true.

I obtain the thin brass sheet from a local dealer in Paris (where I live during the week for work). It is sold in strips 30cm wide, minimum length 100cm. There are also several mail-order houses in France that stock the stuff. Anyway I´m in Vienna every weekend (that´s where my family lives), I could send you some directly if that could help you out. E-mail me.

The lathe cost about 500€. I got it through the French agent of a Dutch firm that receives them straight from Shanghai. Not a small sum, but compared to what you would pay for a Unimat 1 (nice, but a toy), a bit more money gets you get a real 300mm bed-length machine with lots of potential.

I look forward to your future updates as always.

 

Cheers, Jean

[JCote]

Jay and Ango,

 

The Chinese lathes are marketed in the UK under the Chester brand-name. The one I have is the same as the Chester Conquest 7 x 12 lathe. You can check it out by googling Conquest lathe

 

Cheers, Jean

[JCote]

p.s.For more info, check out "mini-lathe.com" (sorry, don´t know how to create a hypertext link)

Jean

[JCote]

The six weeks since my last post have been spent on the frustrating task of making the elevator trim wheel. I wrote at the time that this was promising to be fun, little did I know how much.

The general approach was suggested by http--www.simhardware.org-index.html (cockpit page 1). So with the lathe, the first step was to turn the spindle

[JCote]

Then rough turn the outer diameter of the wheel, leaving a mm extra for later work

[JCote]

Next stage, after parting, was to put the piece in a chuck mounted on a rotary table for drilling 18 x 0.50mm holes with the mill

[JCote]

The result.

[JCote]

Boring the inside diameter with a home-ground tool…

[JCote]

…produced, after turning out the outside diameter, a crenulated wheel ready to accommodate the frets.

[JCote]

Here’s a sample of the casualties of that particular campaign: Some of these failures represented several hours work.

[JCote]

Final operation, putting in the frets and attaching them. Oh no! grossly overscale and unsightly blobs of solder everywhere.

[JCote]

After half-seriously toying with the idea of ditching the whole thing right there, I repeated the same procedure using 0.30mm drill and wire: Drill bits that size are fantastically fragile and I broke a quite few before getting the knack of using them. On the verge of success, I then realised that the chuck was a3 or 4 hundredths of a mm out of round. That hadn‘t been a problem with 0.50mm, but was with 0.30. Sigh!!! So I ordered an appropriately-sized collet for the rotary table (collets give more accuracy than chucks) . While waiting for the parcel, I started hunting for a solution for setting the frets. Gerald Wingrove’s site Wingrove Site Menu (REALLY worth a visit) came up with the goods: tin the wire, i.e. coat the wire with a thin layer of solder…

[JCote]

… cut the frets. put them in place, brush on a bit of flux and heat with a butane torch. My self-confidence was so low by now that I was stoically waiting for another failure, but this time, it worked!