All right, folks, I want to replace the styrene piston rods for a Walthers Jordan Spreader with either steel or aluminum tubing that is .040". Tubing is essential as I need to insert bent eyebolts in the ends for the hinges. Who makes this stuff?
John
Google a company called “Small Tube Products” . They have .040 tubing in Aluminium & other metals.
Dunno anything about this company or have ordered from them either. Hopefully this helps.
Just a thought, but can you buy the appropriately sized hypodermic needle(s) from your local pharmacy, John?
19 Gauge, 0.042” OD, 0.027” ID, appears to be the closest.
Cheers, the Bear.[:)]
I think your best bet would be K&S Metals: http://www.ksmetals.com/resources/cuttolength.pdf
Hi John:
HobbyLinc sells 1.0mm (.039") brass tubing.
http://www.hobbylinc.com/htm/tsm/tsm9943.htm
This is fairly hard brass so it will be plenty stiff enough for your purposes.
Dave
Do you have a local hardware store near you? Two in my city carry the K&S Metals products. Not big box stores.
Rich
Hypodermic needles require a prescription in the US.
There is a True Value, Ace, and Do-It Best hardware store near me, and they all carry a nice selection of K&S metal products. And Hardware Hank also as them.
Mike.
While K&S or Special Shapes can supply such tubing, I modified my Walthers Jordan Spreader using .040" music wire for the pistons. Since the plow wings are normally extended only for photos, this works fine in the plastic cylinders. I hinged the cylinder ends (on the carbody) by drilling through the mounting bracket on the car and also the ball on the end of the cylinder which fits into the bracket, then used .015" music wire for the “hinge pin”…
The fittings on the outer ends of the pistons are parts out of disposable lighters, but you could accomplish the same thing using a couple of small sizes of telescoping brass tubing, with a piece of .015" music wire in the end to serve as a hinge.
I, just now, shot these detail pictures which might help to explain things better.
This is the inboard end of the second-from-the-rear cylinder, with the .015" music wire through the original Walthers’ ball…
…and the outboard end of the rear cylinder. It uses the Walthers’ ball, too, cut from the plastic piston, but the wire hinge is bent into an “L”-shape and inserted into the ball and the lighter part, as the rearmost blade extension needs to swing both out and down rather than just out…
All of the other outboard ends of the pistons are straight, and if I recall correctly, the lighter part was used here rather than the Walthers’ ball - it was easier to use that one-piece arrangement than to modify the
All you need now is a micro servo Wayne to animate the wings. [Y][Y][Y][bow] Great looking spreader.
Mel
Modeling the early to mid 1950s SP in HO scale since 1951
My Model Railroad
http://melvineperry.blogspot.com/
Bakersfield, California
I’m beginning to realize that aging is not for wimps.
As always, great stuff, Wayne. But disposable lighter parts? How’d you come up with that?! “Oh, looky here; I could concieveably use this minor part of a totally unrelated object from a convenience store on the redesign of another minor part of an esoteric railroad car model and be able to encourage someone that I don’t know thousands of miles away two decades after the kit was discontinued and make it good looking to boot and . . .”, etc., etc. Sure you weren’t on Apollo 13 under another name?
Many years ago, I went through disposable lighters rather quickly, and one day got to wondering what was inside them. Working with a spent one, I stuck it in a vice to crack it open and found several interesting looking parts, many of which were dumped into some HobbyBlack, and then became part of scrap loads for gondolas.
The rust-coloured serrated wheel-like thing, mid-car on the far side of this gondola, is the striker for the flint:
There are lots more of the same part in this car, along with a couple of the metal portions of the “trigger” mechanism which turns the striker. It’s the rust-coloured object in the near end of this car, with a square-ish opening in its centre and a smaller round hole in each end. Also in this car, but just barely visible, is one of the parts which I used on my spreader.
There’s a semi-squished rust-coloured piece of thin tubing, about a third of the carlength from the far end. Immediately to its left, and against the back of a vertical black plastic wheel, is a small, grey-ish cylindrical-shaped item, with a slightly larger tip on its upper end - only about half of it is visible. Part of that visible portion is what was used:
Well, I knew if I went through enough pictures, I’d eventually find a photo showing the original part. It’s here, near the far side of the car and parallel to it, and roughly between the third and fourth ribs on the car’s side. The small, open end is facing the car’s brakewheel, and the shouldered larger end (the part used) is clearly visible if you enlarge the photo…
These parts
Necessity has another child. It’s the creativity of the mind that brought about this particular “conception” that’s rather amazing.
On the other hand, I too have started noticing odd, but neat stuff in strange places. Like the streets of a nearby national cemetery. While walking them last year I found that the cemetery’s street sweeper had cast occasional steel “bristles” from its rotating brushes. There was one to be had every half dozen feet or so, perhaps 1x4mm and from 10 to 14cm long. I now have a couple fist fuls (or fists full?) of nice, theoretically scale bulk steel stock, and already “weathered” for scenic or other later use. As a gondola load, it would certainly ensure that the car’s trucks would stay at home!
It would be quite the survey of fellow modellers to gather a list of this kind of stuff, items that have become functional on pikes or equipment in ways never intended by the orginal manufacturers. Shall we make this a new subject under the Prototype module here in the forums?
Ngineering.com sells various sizes of small tubing.
MV, Thanks for notice on the Ngineering folks. Looks like they have a wider product line that even K & S. John