Catching Pictures in the Air

[hendie]

8 minutes ago, Dermo245 said:

Absolutely brilliant stuff and going back to read all 19 pages right now.

 

you can skip half of it 'cos he doesn't tell you the full story until about page 17 !

[keefr22]

14 hours ago, TheBaron said:

 if nothing else it makes me feel like Anthony Hopkins coming out of the water at the start of When Eight Bells Toll....

 

My favourite ever film! Once sat and watched it 4 times in a row in the local flea pit (from the matinee showing to one starting near midnight - the usherette kept coming around & checking on me after ever showing, must have thought i'd died during the film...!!) Just about wore out my VHS tape of it, & now you've reminded me I'll have to see if it's on DVD...!! Can't think why it grabbed my imagination the way it did...And I now have the film score echoing around my empty noggin..!!

 

Keith  (& who asks can he have ice cream again when I get the DVD...?!)

[TheBaron]

17 hours ago, 71chally said:

You don't get to see the bottom when your local coast line is well up the Bristol channel!

Silty eh? Are you up near the mouth of the Severn James? Those are some serious mudflats IIRC!

14 hours ago, hendie said:

Atholl Brose

I must confess I'd never heard of this drink until you mentioned it hendie - a drink of the Gods if ever. Now I know what Eddie Reader was singing about so beautifully in this rendition:

 

14 hours ago, Dermo245 said:

How on earth have I missed this one?! Absolutely brilliant stuff and going back to read all 19 pages right now.

You're welcome to the thread Dermot!

 

[TheBaron]

15 hours ago, hendie said:

you the full story until about page 17 !

...and there's the nuclear reactor of course, tucked in just behind the launch ramp for the minisub....

6 hours ago, keefr22 said:

My favourite ever film!

One of mine too Keith! That and Riddle of the Sands make a perfect rainy Sunday afternoon double-bill IMHO. Funnily enough I'd been listening to an audio-book of WEBT in the car coming home from work during March, and I have to say this is one instance where the film seems better than the book - I'd forgotten what a dreadful old plodder MacClean could be in much of his writing, despite his ability to hook out a good yarn. Classic soundtrack too as you say!

 

I would have sent my copy over to you but I gave it to a charity shop a few years back when we ditched all disk based media:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/When-Eight-Bells-Toll-DVD/dp/B0001P1B3O/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1492867085&sr=1-1&keywords=when+eight+bells+toll

There's Bluray as well IIRC, but I think it may not play on UK players...

 

I won't pretend today's session has been fun - quite the contrary. It started off promisingly enough looking at this piece and thinking 'let's just tidy-up the cradles for the retrieval poles' with a view to getting themn into their final positions:

I needed to solder an upright onto this starboard framework, so it was back to Legoland to get a port and starboard agreeing with each other in terms of the correct slope:

 

Using the holding-arms of an old soldering-iron stand (Open the pod-bay doors Hal) offered a useful way of holding the frame in place at the correct angle against the vertical pole whilst soldering the two parts together:

Using plenty of wet tissue as a sink seemed to work fine in stopping the heat travelling out to damage the plastic and protecting previous solders along that run:

A little messy but nothing a little file can't sort:

Buoyed-up by this, I decided to press on and start adding the angled reinforcing brackets that heklp keep this structure rigid. Same procedure as before, wet tissue to protect existing solder joints:

Having deliberately used higher temp. solder on the previous joins, I switched here to lower temp. cadmium solder that had a melting point half of the previous lead stuff, thinking that would be safe enough with a quick play of the blowtorch.

 

Disaster!

 

Despite all my precautions the heat travelled outwards too swiftly from the tiny angled bracket that you can see in the shot above and that whole corner joint collapsed. In the process of trying to pull the pieces apart before the solder hardened, I managed to comprehensively mangle the delicate framework into something resembling a crashed airship. Oh-the-feckin-huge-manatee....

 

At this stage I tried very very hard  to quieten the mood by picturing calming nature scenes, but all I saw was this

When all creation had ceased to scream I got a glass of water and sat down to rebuild the whole framework until eventually this emerged:

New improved framework! Now with extra framework!

 

Taking no chances with this blighter shifting once it's fixed into place, I built a brass collar into the decking as well, in order to provide more reinforcement at the bottom against any boinging about:

After 20 minutes argy-bargy getting angles and heights sorted from all sides:

From the rear:

The starboard framework still needs to be lower to match the port level, and that angled bracket is still wrong. Must do better.

 

It's all been a terrible dream....

Tony

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[qn30jEkPz7]

"boinging about" is my new go-to euphemism 

[hendie]

nice work on the soldering.  I always try to wrap any "at danger" joints in wet tissue before I apply the heat - sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

 

 

[TheBaron]

On the basis of  'get back up on the horse', I decided to exorcise this morning's session with a bash at the forward port mounting for the pole. Much more amenable results this time:

One change this time around was using Blutak all around to help hold all of the parts in place in one go, rather than trying two separate stages as previously. Whether this helped absorb more of the heat from the blowtorch I don't know, but this went together much more neatly in one go. A test fit to check from the rear:

I'll go for that. I'll rustle up the rearmost one of that port pair tomorrow and then fix them into place permanently:

I'll also need to cut down the horizontals of the starboard one to match the curvature of the fuselage.

 

 

[keefr22]

Apologies if I've missed it Tony, but what size blowtorch do you use for such fine soldering work?

 

Keith

[CedB]

Nice work Tony

That first photo looks as though you've stuck the support in the side of your index finger - the 'tak looks just like a close up of your hand, thumb nail and all. Scary.

[Cookenbacher]

I was told there would be no need for a blowtorch when entering the hobby.

[perdu]

5 hours ago, Cookenbacher said:

I was told there would be no need for a blowtorch when entering the hobby.

They lied!

 

A basic bare minimum is a permanently lit candle, plastic for terra forming poipoises

 

A small pencil flamed blow torch is a de-luxe accessory

 

 

He lied

 

 

 

[TheBaron]

13 hours ago, keefr22 said:

Apologies if I've missed it Tony, but what size blowtorch do you use for such fine soldering work?

Mornin' Keith.

It's nothing fancy at all:

It's one of those cheapie chef's ones. Great for burning the sugar topping onto a  Crème brûlée of Carrageen Moss Pudding - even better for melting lead or cadmium solder. I'm criminally incompetent with a soldering iron (I've a pal who fixes amps and electric guitars who just seems to wave the iron in blessing over anything broken and it's fixed by sympathetic magic - me I just ended up with whatever I tried to build fully concealed in solder...) This method has been a complete revelation by comparison. At this scale, I shave off some thin flakes of solder (make sure you use gloves) and pack them onto some Powerflow flux around the join, then a second or two on low power at most is all it needs. 

13 hours ago, CedB said:

That first photo looks as though you've stuck the support in the side of your index finger - the 'tak looks just like a close up of your hand, thumb nail and all. Scary.

Aaagh! My skin! My lovely blue skin! 

10 hours ago, Cookenbacher said:

I was told there would be no need for a blowtorch when entering the hobby.

 

4 hours ago, perdu said:

They lied!

 

A basic bare minimum is a permanently lit candle, plastic for terra forming poipoises

 

A small pencil flamed blow torch is a de-luxe accessory

Let thy testament be honoured Brother perdu:

 

I've been off the booze for the last week or so and had a good deep sleep last night; I don't know if the two factors are related - or indeed whether this signifies some potential change in behaviour - but either way it was a bit more Bruneval and a little less Dieppe when commencing operations on the bench this morning.

 

Ignore the wonky fuel-tank framework in this shot (it's just plonked onto some blutak to stop it shifting), the critical first task this morning was to establish correct heights and angles prior to gluing the pole supports into place:

I'd agonized somewhat over whether to fix the brass into place at this stage. In the end I decided that it made more sense to get these firmly fixed to the decking with some extra brass collar-work at the base for strength, rather than struggle to do this prior to closing-up and end up damaging the paintwork in the ensuing struggle. There's a bit more detail to add at this stage, but with all the brass CA'd into place now, that's the essential spatial relationship for these elements now secured in place: 

In yesterday's photos I'd noticed that I'd got the heights and angles of these parts slightly wrong (I'd been using the wrong line on the cargo bulkhead as a visual reference), so what you see here is corrected by lopping about 2mm off the heights of the uprights, and altering the downslope angle to what it should be. One of the key correspondences to work out if you've got this bit sorted correctly is the rearmost pole over on the starboard side, in terms of how it triangulates with the fuel tank framework and loadmasters' seat. It's taken me so long -  and more attempts than I care to remember -  to get these bits right, due to the fact that although the downslope of the mounts for the poles has to be set identically on each side, no two mounts are the same structure and all are mounted onto different places on the floor. In other words, you need to get a symmetrical result here from an unsymmetrical arrangement of parts. Tricky!

 

After double-checking that was in a fit state to proceed, it was on to finish of the final detailing on those frames:

There were a couple of diagonal braces needed adding, these were CA'd in place as they have no real load-bearing function here due to the fact the poles will be hanging out the back on this build, not up on the internal supports as in some of the reference shots.

 

You can see also I added the little circular 'cuffs' in on some of the horizontals (presumably to keep the poles from jumping out of the frames):

These were punched out of thin plasticard using a 2mm hole punch, and fixed into place using Gator Grip, of which I recently acquired both kinds. 30 minutes of cussing and cajolery and they were all on:

A last squint up from the rear:

The final task before moving on from the brasswork is of course to trim the ends of the horizontals where they meet the internal curvature of the fuselage, but I want all that to have a chance to set into place properly before attempting that so knocking-off for the day now.

 

I'm feeling quite positive about today's session in terms of having broken through on a particularly challenging part of the build. Well, that and the fact that my youngest has just handed me a bowl of chocolate Angel Delight (actually Lidl's own-brand 'Heavenly Delight') he's knocked-up. Pure 70s culinary-chemical nirvana as a late 11ses -  he really is my favourite son sometimes! If you don't hear me talking much about my eldest son btw, it's simply that he has transitioned into full-blown teenagehood and alternates between reading, hibernation, and grunting at his parents for food. It's like sharing the house with a large and rather sweet bear that's into YA novels...

 

Have a great Sunday all of you.

Tony

 

 

 

 

[keefr22]

59 minutes ago, TheBaron said:

If you don't hear me talking much about my eldest son btw, it's simply that he has transitioned into full-blown teenagehood and alternates between reading, hibernation, and grunting at his parents for food. It's like sharing the house with a large and rather sweet bear that's into YA novels...

 

Sounds a lot like my boy. Trouble is he's 33. At least he's left home....!! 

 

Ta for the info on the blowtorch, shall invest in one of those. I'm much the same with a soldering iron (& a welding torch!) & if I can get some nice delicate soldered joints like yours, I'll be rather pleased! Your framework is looking very nice indeed!

 

ATB

 

k

[hendie]

6 minutes ago, keefr22 said:

Your framework is looking very nice indeed!

 

agreed - really starting to take on a filigree and shadow like composition

 

[Martian]

Still slightly befuddled as to what is going on but it looks good.

 

Martian who will ever understand you Earthlings

[Fritag]

 

2 hours ago, Martian Hale said:

Still slightly befuddled as to what is going on but it looks good.

 

Me too.  So much good brass-work going on that I'm getting flashbacks to an @hendie build........... 

[CedB]

Very nice Tony - those little cuffs look great and it's all coming together now, amazing stuff.

'They' say that laying off the alcohol helps you sleep but I think it's more to do with your mental attitude and physical state - beer has certainly helped me sleep in the past!

Nice to remember the Angel Delight buzz and good on yer little one. 

I feel for you on the eldest - teenagers eh? Cuh! 

[Tomoshenko]

 

Nice work on those 1/72 television aerials Tony. Angel Delight mmmm. Do Lidl do an equivalent of Findus crispy pancakes?

 

19 hours ago, Cookenbacher said:

I was told there would be no need for a blowtorch when entering the hobby.

To that list you can also had lathe, punch sets, fancy etch folding thingies, resin casting kits, silicon casting kits, micromesh pads, Alclad paints....etc...erm I think this is going to take a while.

[The Spadgent]

It makes me feel better about my own mini plight watching what you're going through every evening at the bench. I bet your dreams are full of brass rod. ( Cue Ced.) wonderful stuff. I'm boggling thinking about it.

 

Johnny boggle

[71chally]

You've gone from modelling int a realm of something that I don't quite understand - superb work what ever it is!

[TheBaron]

On 4/23/2017 at 1:43 PM, Martian Hale said:

Still slightly befuddled as to what is going on but it looks good.

 

On 4/23/2017 at 4:15 PM, Fritag said:

Me too.  So much good brass-work going on that I'm getting flashbacks to an @hendie build........... 

 

7 hours ago, 71chally said:

You've gone from modelling int a realm of something that I don't quite understand - superb work what ever it is!

 

I can sympathize. I'd almost think I'd been channelling @perdus 'crazed red spider' (in hendie's memorable phrase):

My own brass maze is not exactly easy to follow - especially with some of the laterals not yet trimmed down to fit inside the fuselage - so I've had Hugh Scully and the Antiques Roadshow team in to provide an expert guide to the item:

Verdict: 'Poss. 16th Century, School of Cellini. Incomplete. Brass blunnions with perpendicular cross-spelters; unusual spaggered escutcheon on the lowest crespule.'

Value: Uncertain. A similar item recently went for several pence at a car boot sale in Norwich.

 

Now. To other corespondence.

On 4/23/2017 at 1:27 PM, keefr22 said:

 

Sounds a lot like my boy. Trouble is he's 33. At least he's left home....!! 

 

Ta for the info on the blowtorch, shall invest in one of those. I'm much the same with a soldering iron (& a welding torch!) & if I can get some nice delicate soldered joints like yours, I'll be rather pleased! Your framework is looking very nice indeed!

. My eldest is 17 and barely leaves the bed, let alone the house at weekends....

 

I'm rather fancying those refillable pencil blowtorches that Bill mentioned in his post above - they look very handy for the scale.

On 4/23/2017 at 1:36 PM, hendie said:

 

agreed - really starting to take on a filigree and shadow like composition

 

Thanks hendie. A bit of trimming down needed to get it to fit into the fuselage but at least I'm happy the brass-parts are strong enough to put up with a little pruning.

 

22 hours ago, CedB said:

Very nice Tony - those little cuffs look great and it's all coming together now, amazing stuff.

'They' say that laying off the alcohol helps you sleep but I think it's more to do with your mental attitude and physical state - beer has certainly helped me sleep in the past!

Nice to remember the Angel Delight buzz and good on yer little one. 

I feel for you on the eldest - teenagers eh? Cuh! 

Cheers for that amigo. I celebrated being booze-less for a week last night by having a substantive bottle of Normandy cider at supper and can report sleeping equally as well as the previous night. I reckon that's a vote for your mental attitude/physical state diagnosis Ced! You're my kind of physician.

Hmm. That unfortunately reminds me that I'm overdue for ringing my local GP in order to obtain the results of my recent bloodwork vis-a-vis cholesterol levels. I'm expecting him to say very good progress eat more cheese and wine  that I need to bring a bucket to the chemist in future to collect the necessary dose of statins.

18 hours ago, Tomoshenko said:

Nice work on those 1/72 television aerials Tony. Angel Delight mmmm. Do Lidl do an equivalent of Findus crispy pancakes?

Thanks Tomo. I believe in the UK you may be able to obtain FCCs in Iceland. I did try making them myself once but mine came out too healthy and lacking in grease. They just didn't taste right.

18 hours ago, Tomoshenko said:

To that list you can also had lathe, punch sets, fancy etch folding thingies, resin casting kits, silicon casting kits, micromesh pads, Alclad paints....etc...erm I think this is going to take a while.

On this showing I am an inadequate underachiever and must spend more money immediately.

17 hours ago, The Spadgent said:

 I bet your dreams are full of brass rod.

To be more accurate, dreams full of how I'm going to pay for the required tonnage of brass toobs if this soldering obsessions persists...

[Ex-FAAWAFU]

Your soldering skills are admirable.  I too am a devotee of the blowtorch, having had minimal success after numerous bodges with a conventional soldering iron.  The other revelation for me was the discovery (on recommendation from someone on this very forum, tho I cannot recall who) of solder paint.  Much of my soldering thus far has been at 1/350 scale, which is all a bit silly - the less actual solder involved the better, really.

 

Anyhoo, I commend solder paint to the house.

[CedB]

1 hour ago, TheBaron said:

I'm expecting him to say very good progress eat more cheese and wine  that I need to bring a bucket to the chemist in future to collect the necessary dose of statins.

 

Probably. I refuse to have my cholesterol tested as I don't believe in averages. Who's 'average'? Not me for sure and I don't want to be reliant on drugs to make me so, thank you.

Statins are part of the big pharma conspiracy as shown on this helpful chart, recently posted elsewhere by our own PC. It's humour - at least I think it is...

 

Did you see that Billy Connolly documentary recently? They showed the clip where he 'discusses' whether to eat white or brown bread. "I'll eat white and you eat brown and you'll live three years longer. But it won't be three years while you're active, it'll be three years being fed jello by the nurse. 'You're looking smiley today - has another white bread eater died?'"

I refuse to exchange my current pleasures for a few more years in the nursing home. Live fast...

[TheBaron]

Got home this evening to find the cats guarding the biscuits from the chickens. Feathers vs. Fur Smackdown!

1 hour ago, Ex-FAAWAFU said:

Anyhoo, I commend solder paint to the house.

My thanks for your kind comments Crisp. I shall investigate this solder paint forthwith!

1 hour ago, CedB said:

I refuse to exchange my current pleasures for a few more years in the nursing home. Live fast..

I concur!

[perdu]

6 hours ago, TheBaron said:

 

 

 

To be more accurate, dreams full of how I'm going to pay for the required tonnage of brass toobs if this soldering obsessions persists...

As you'd no doubt understand old bean, I have a chap for that too

 

 

A mate, on occasions comes in to club with a stack of brass tubes which are residual after an industrial process has finished with them and hands them round freely

 

Many of us are scratchy fiends so we make bee-lines for him when it's bits time

 

Some of these amazing things have more than one hole extruded into them

And so far my pictures have not appeared 

 

ho hum maybe later huh...

 

 

 

 

 

Possibly a glitch in Postimage.org, expect them soon

 

Ah goodoh, here they are

Edited April 24, 2017 by perdu