Watchmakers' work

Apologies for the delay in posting - Blogspot seems to have had a funny couple of days :-(

One of the things that I really love about High Level Kits is that they are such fiddly things to build.  Not difficult, certainly not badly designed, but containing such a  level of detail that it really pushes the boundaries of your skill levels to do the job properly.

Last night was like that.  After a long and tough week at work, which meant that I wasn't able to join friends in either Hay on Wye or Wakefield for the weekend, for various other reasons as well, I determined that last night was going to involve some modelling.

The next thing on my list of instructions (I'm on page 7 out of 18, and this is for a kit that is under 8cm long!) was to fit the clips that hold (what I think are) the sandbox operating rods.  These clips go under the saddle tank, and are soldered to it.  Here are a couple of pictures of the work completed:

 

They are each made from a single small piece of etched brass, soldered in place and then bent over to form a clip. However to give you some idea of the size of the part, and the level of detail that is built into these kits, when you bend the half-etched part of the clip over, to ensure that it takes the correct shape you use a piece of 0.4mm wire as a former!

After this, there were a couple more brackets to be fitted to the front of the tank, and a couple of valves to be mounted on those, and it was finally fitted in place and soldered to the bunkers and smokebox. And as you would expect from everything that this kit has been so far, it fitted together perfectly...

A quick wash down with lashings of ginger beer, or rather Carrs Acidip, and a trip through the ultrasonic tank to clean it up, and it was looking lovely

Cheers
Flymo