11-15-2009, 07:38 PM
The only difficulty I had in assembling the kit was the handrails. .020 brass wire is supplied to make the railings, and a template for cutting the parts. Here you see my first attempt.
I decided to opt for using CA rather than solder. I laid out the pieces on wax paper over teh template, and glued. I thought they looked reasonably good. However, when I took them off teh wax paper, I had quite a bit of nasty looking excess glue. When I tried to clean them up, they fell apart. I decided to use .020 styrene rod instead, and not to worry about the small bend in the right hand side railing, meant to accomodate the mailbox. Particularly since I was not modeling the prototype. I built three pairs before I had two I felt were acceptable. I painted and installed them, but they warped a bit and while they looked ok from a 90 degree angle, you can see they didn't look too good at this angle.
So I printed new templates, glued them to some Homasote, and tried soldering brass. This actually worked pretty well.
I decided to opt for using CA rather than solder. I laid out the pieces on wax paper over teh template, and glued. I thought they looked reasonably good. However, when I took them off teh wax paper, I had quite a bit of nasty looking excess glue. When I tried to clean them up, they fell apart. I decided to use .020 styrene rod instead, and not to worry about the small bend in the right hand side railing, meant to accomodate the mailbox. Particularly since I was not modeling the prototype. I built three pairs before I had two I felt were acceptable. I painted and installed them, but they warped a bit and while they looked ok from a 90 degree angle, you can see they didn't look too good at this angle.
So I printed new templates, glued them to some Homasote, and tried soldering brass. This actually worked pretty well.