Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Canopus: Replacement Connecting Rods

So it's been almost three months since I last did any work on Canopus. If you can remember back that far then you'll know that I hit a bit of a problem as some of the parts that come with the kit aren't the right size. Specifically the slide bars are two close in to the wheels and the connecting rods are a touch too short. It should be fairly easy to move the slide bars out slightly but there is now way to stretch the connecting rods to make them longer. The solution was to get a new set of rods etched.

A few days ago the new rods arrived in the post having been etched for me by Narrow Planet. On it's own that might not be worth a blog post, but what you are looking at is the first set of etched components for which I've drawn the artwork! Okay, so Steve did tweak them slightly but I did the majority of the work.

I actually only need two rods but these are etched onto 0.25mm nickel silver whereas the kit uses 0.5mm, although it seems to measure out nearer to 0.4mm, so I'll probably have to laminate two rods together to get the right thickness and strength, although it's tempting to see if I one rod is strong enough as this will improve the tight clearances involved.

Now I know roughly what I'm doing I've moved on to drawing up the artwork for the body panels for the tiny Hudson-Hunslet but that can wait until the next post.

5 comments:

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    1. Yep, and they are still bigger than the originals. Mind you if you think these are small wait until you see some of the parts I've been drawing up for the Hudson-Hunslet!

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  2. Looking back on this build, I wonder if its worth etching new slidebars and offering them alongside replacement con. rods as a 'completion kit' for this loco so anyone else looking to build one can benefit from your experience?

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    1. Now I have a better idea how to do the etch artwork, I might have a go at drawing up replacement slidebars as well. I did think about offering an etch of replacement parts but there was a general feeling that publicly offering something to essentially "fix" someone else's kit was wrong. If someone asks me for a set though I'm sure it could be arranged.

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