Madness in 1:48

[Barney]

Thats lovely for a "bit of Rot"
it makes a lot of difference a bit of sun for good lighting
Barney

[Ray Dunakin]

Looks great!

[WP Rayner]

Not much time for the model bench these days what with the supposed arrival of spring and all the work delayed by winter, that needs to be done on the property. However, I did make time to prepare the engine for the derelict Ford (minus the water hoses which will be part of the final assembly). The engine casting was robbed from an old Scale Structures kit I had sitting on the shelf. I cut off the cast-on sparkplugs and replaced them with .040" dia and .030" dia brass tubing assemblies. The top ends of the .030" dia tubes were turned down to represent the insulated shaft of the spark plugs. The bigger issue though was the fan/fan belt which was a horrible old cerrobend casting, so I opted to scratch a replacement.

The pulley and hub are simple brass turnings. I made the fan blade by sandwiching a piece of .008" T. brass shim stock to a piece of .025" T. styrene, then glued a CAD drawing of the blade onto the brass. The overall dia. of the fan blade is .270". I drilled a centre hole for the shaft, then cut out the blade with a jeweler's saw and dressed the edges with a file. I peeled off the drawing and dropped the brass/styrene sandwich into a bath of MEK which dissolved away the styrene leaving just the brass blade. I then annealed each vane of the blade and radiused each vane by forming it with a small embossing tool in a fixture into which I had milled a small half-round channel with a ball mill.

The next challenge was the broken fan belt. I laminated 10 pieces of Watchpaper (a very fine tissue paper, non-oxidizing and used to wrap watch movements, parts, etc) using water-soluble glue. I clamped the glued paper into a vise to cure to insure proper gluing and consistent thickness (approx. .012"). Once cured, I sliced off a strip .018" W. There's a sample of the straight stock in the first photo below (the items are sitting on a piece of Watchpaper tissue). I then dampened a small section in the centre of the strip and formed it over a piece of nylon rod into which I had turned a duplicate of the brass fan hub (in the rear of the photo), weighting each end of the strip with clamping tweezers. Once cured, I had a tall U-shaped piece. Then cut one arm short and the other longer at a length that would lay into the bottom of the motor casting. I then dampened that end and set the belt into place on the brass pulley and carefully prodded and pushed the damp end into position. Once cured, I coloured the belt with permanent marker and various dusting powders. The finished belt is at the front in the first photo. The other two photos show the engine as it stands now. BTW there is no distributor on this engine, the plug wires all run to the firewall.

And now, it's time to get back to chainsaw work... apparently the power company wants us to remove two more trees on the property!

[finescalerr]

Impressive. And it must have taken a few hours to cobble together those parts. -- Russ

[SandiaPaul]

Engine looks great..be lucky you don't have to remove 10 ash trees like a neighbor does. All dead from Emerald Ash Borer

[WP Rayner]

Impressive. And it must have taken a few hours to cobble together those parts. -- Russ

Thanks Russ... yes it did take a few hours but spread out in fits and starts over a period of several weeks. Be glad when I can get back to a regular schedule in the workshop.

Engine looks great..be lucky you don't have to remove 10 ash trees like a neighbor does. All dead from Emerald Ash Borer

Thanks Paul. Definitely not lucky. We took down 7 Ash trees last October (remaining sawing, splitting, and cleanup of those halted because of winter in November) and now there are to be 2 more. After that there are 3 more large Ash that will need to come down in the foreseeable future, all because of the Emerald Ash Borer. Sad to see them go, but better that than to have them come crashing down onto the house, garage, or barn.

[Chuck Doan]

Beautiful work Paul!

[Ray Dunakin]

Great job! I like your idea of bonding the thin sheet brass to styrene for cutting, then melting away the styrene.

[WP Rayner]

Beautiful work Paul!

Thank you Chuck... much appreciated!

Great job! I like your idea of bonding the thin sheet brass to styrene for cutting, then melting away the styrene.

Thanks Ray. Bonding the shim brass to the styrene made a difficult job much easier and prevented the brass sheet from deforming while cutting.

[WP Rayner]

Here's a shot of the Ash trees after they were felled at the end of October. There were 7 felled in total, running along the front of the property.

[WP Rayner]

This second shot shows the start of the process of cutting up the trees. The smaller logs were chopped into approx. foot-long chunks which we started splitting for fire wood. The large trunks were chainsaw milled into a few 3' dia. slabs and some 4" T. x 8' L. planks which are now curing in the barn. One trunk remains to be cut into planks and there remains a huge amount of splitting to be done. The stumps were all ground late in November just before the ground froze. Work halted because of winter and with spring being so wet and cold this year, we haven't been able to make much headway on the final trunk and the splitting. With two more trees to come down shortly, it looks like this process is destined to continue for some time. Going to take years for the front lawn to recover.

[finescalerr]

Was any of the wood usable for rough construction or furniture? -- Russ

[Lawton Maner]

Russ:
     Home milled wood makes good furniture if air dried carefully.  Remember that before the middle of the 19th century all furniture was made from air dried lumber.  I could point out that when you took your first shop classes that all that was available.  I on the other hand had to make my first shop projects from rocks.

WP:
     After 3 years of careful air drying, indoors, we all expect you to move up to 1:1 scale and make some impressive furniture.  Ash can be a difficult wood to work with as it usually needs scraping to get a good surface for finishing rather then sanding.  Please make sure all of the slabs are properly stickered and weighted on top and like a good wine the magic ingredient is time.  A simple first project could be a shadow box to put the diorama in.

[WP Rayner]

Was any of the wood usable for rough construction or furniture? -- Russ

Russ:
     Home milled wood makes good furniture if air dried carefully.  Remember that before the middle of the 19th century all furniture was made from air dried lumber.  I could point out that when you took your first shop classes that all that was available.  I on the other hand had to make my first shop projects from rocks.

WP:
     After 3 years of careful air drying, indoors, we all expect you to move up to 1:1 scale and make some impressive furniture.  Ash can be a difficult wood to work with as it usually needs scraping to get a good surface for finishing rather then sanding.  Please make sure all of the slabs are properly stickered and weighted on top and like a good wine the magic ingredient is time.  A simple first project could be a shadow box to put the diorama in.

Russ and Lawton: That is the reason we've been milling the large 4" T. slabs in the hope that once dried, they will be a source for some useful lumber. The heartwood and sapwood appear to be sound throughout. The damage from the Ash Borer is limited to the cambium layer so the inner and outer bark just fall away. We won't really know how useful the wood will be though until it is dried. The large slaps are being set up with proper stickering in the barn for drying. An Amish friend is providing a great deal of help with the chain sawing and splitting in return for the wood. He'll have a major supply of firewood by the time we're finished and I believe he's hoping to get some construction wood and wood for a large table out of the long slabs (at least his wife has told him he is...  ). I've saved two nominally 3' dia. x 4" T. cross-section slabs which are drying in my "heavy" workshop in the garage with the intent of producing two coffee tables. It will be a rather daunting challenge as I have no machinery big enough to handle such large pieces, so will have to rely on a substantial amount of router work followed by hand-plane and scraper work to create usable table tops.

Lawton, thanks for the insights into working with ash. I've never worked it before. I studied furniture design and construction at the Wendel Castle School back in the 1980s and went on to be one of the founding staff members at the short-lived Genoa Furniture Design School which came about when Wendel sold his school to the School for American Craftsmen at RIT. Unfortunately, I had to stop working with wood at that level because of health reasons. Turns out I'm allergic to trees and have to wear a respirator when working wood for any 1:1 scale construction. Outdoors I can get away with a mask when chainsawing. I don't have any issues working with wood in the model shop fortunately, mainly because the pieces are so small and I'm creating very little dust, but as soon as I break out the circular saw, routers, sander, planes, and scrapers, on goes the respirator. Bit of a pain...

[1-32]

Hi Paul.
interesting project lovely engine.
If you don't like woodwork just sell the cured slabs.
cheers