The first gun assembled

It has been a very long time since I posted anything, largely because not much was happening. But now there is some progress again: the first gun is finally assembled. I had already milled the gun carriages from Castello boxwood at the start of this year, and the little rings and the washers made from pin heads were ready and waiting too. It is all not quite perfect yet, but I need ten of them. So hopefully each one will turn out a little neater than the last.

The parts are not glued together but joined with pins and washers. I still need to do something with the quoin; most likely it will simply be painted red (Ptèr also thought that the most obvious choice). The handles for the quoins still have to be turned, and of course the whole lot still needs rigging.

Erik B asked whether the scale really is 1:64. It is. To give an idea, I laid the little chain next to a ruler: each mark is 1 mm, the total length is about 8 mm and the pin is 0.5 mm thick. Fiddly work, and in fact the chain is still slightly too large for the scale. But I could not find a smaller one. Piet remarked that proportions are always a bit of a problem on any model: guns and fittings are nearly always too large, otherwise they are practically impossible to work on. The trick is to make something attractive of it all the same.

Pins made from dressmaker’s pins

The linchpins in the trucks I made from brass dressmaker’s pins. I flatten the head and then file it to the shape I want. The pins themselves are slightly too thick, so as a final step I turn them down a little: pin in the Dremel, and hold a diamond needle file against it.