Boiler (First Version)
Here's a piece of plastic tubing that will be used to form the new
boiler. It is slightly longer than the old version, and larger at both
ends, but roughly the same width in the middle. It is slightly oversize
to account for the very slight resin and mold shrinkage. Also, I have no
plans to work from, so this is all eyeballed based on photos in the references
mentioned on the first page of this section.
Here's the new smokebox sitting on the riveter. I had to do 5 rows of
parallel rivets for the smokebox. The plastic is .010" styrene
sheet. I squared it up on the riveter using a machinest's square and my
L-ruler. The riveter only has horizontal movement controls, so for each
row, I had to untape the styrene, move it, square it back up and start over.
Here is the new smokebox, all riveted and installed on the boiler tube.
Luckily, the rest of the boiler shell is pretty much rivetless. The
Sensipress makes riveting much easier, but it is still tedious work.
That's one of the things that really made me step back from working on the
I2. The I2 has an enormous tender with a ton of rivets. Maybe
someday I'll set up for photo-etching and I'll do things like this in brass; it
is much easier to copy and paste in a computer program than in real life
<g>. For an idea of scale, that green tube propping up the
smokebox is one of my hobby knives (about the size of a pen)
Be sure to sign my guestbook
.while you're here :-)
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