Paul Tomlinson
Some progress has been made, and I’ve reached another head-scratching moment… I’ve started afresh, so there’s now mk1 and mk2 frames. After I’d had chance to reflect a bit, I cleaned up mk1 to erase some of the excess solder, and applied the iron to re-seat a couple of the horncheeks so they sat truly flush with the frames. I’ve got a set of self-clamping tweezers, which helped enormously. I soldered on the csb tags to the hornblocks, and filed the inner face smooth. I’m altogether more happy with the result. I’d used a set of 7mm knobs for the csb anchors, which line up ok with the LRM tags, but as the High Level tags sit closer to the frame, I decided to set about a second chassis, along identical lines to the first, but using 4mm anchors. Not wanting to repeat the battle aligning the horncheeks, I decided to try a different approach. I’d used the vertical drill on my Unimat to drill the rods at 26mm centres, so I made a jig out of the most suitable material to hand, again using the graduated feed on the lathe bed to drill axle holes to match the rods. A bit of a gamble, but I’m hopeful for a successful outcome. After applying a bit of black marker to try and stop the solder creeping and jamming everything up, and a bit of hot tape on the frames for a similar reason, I used the jig, and the tweezers, to attach the horncheeks in the flat, then assembled the frames using the Comet jig. I thought I’d have more clearance between the hornblocks to slot the gearbox in, but both frames are pretty much identical.
Paul Tomlinson
73A
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