john lewsey
Western Thunderer
Thank you
John
John
I think I also need to learn how to anneal properly, the last piece I did turned to butter so I cold roll and form all of my stuff at present. Can one harden brass after it has been annealed and formed to shape?
Nice barn conversion, it's almost a shame to put a railway in there LOL
Can one harden brass after it has been annealed and formed to shape?
Although I do not know the exact details I feel sure that Steph Dale can give you chapter and verse on it.
One other trick is to leave it a while on a south-facing window sill; the diurnal cycling will re-harden the material quite effectively, but it might take a week or two!
Steph
Yep; as Paul says you can work it. One other trick is to leave it a while on a south-facing window sill; the diurnal cycling will re-harden the material quite effectively, but it might take a week or two!
This is how I incorporated Colin’s (Eastsidepilot) side control into the bogie. As provided in the kit there is no suspension, no side control and even the spring that is supposed to keep the bogie on the track was too short. So it did nothing at all.
Recently I have been working on the tender body, this has a flared top and corners. DA provides a half etched strip for the flare with slotted ‘fingers’ for the flare at the corners. He says to fill the fingers with solder after forming the flare and file it to shape. Now I do not find this sort of exercise easy in the first place, but it is achievable with care. But how do you then solder an upstand on to the whole thing, including the soldered corners. It did not take me long to realise that this method would result in tears, so I decided to form some flared corners from brass and fit them into the flared sides and end.
but having built a few of DA's LNW tenders I've not had any problems with the 'fingers' method of the flare corners. Admittedly the solder infill does require a fair amount of fettling up to get a neat end result , the etched 'flare' being soldered to the tender side before forming it round . This way of doing it is not new , I spoke to Geoff Holt at a LNW Soc. 'Do' on the very subject more than a few years back and he kindly sent me a sketch at the time showing this method of doing it and using plumbers solder to fill in between the fingers , he reckoned it was more 'elastic' in filling gaps. All that said, I may well have to brush up on my metal forming skills and have a go with annealed brass as shown .
It is indeed the inside edge of the corner that's a problem to tidy up the solder , and is where your formed brass Inserts score .
Add in the fact that the brass was half etched, and only about 10thou thick. So the problem was magnified.