The big lump is attached. After a fair bit of heat, loads of flux and plenty of solder, the Ruston locomotive is looking a lot more finished.
The kit is very helpful here. At the front a couple of slots and tabs locate the front in the right place in all directions. At the back the cab front is marked with a half etch line to assist location. OK, I still measured and squared to make sure the thing was running parallel to the footplate side and central, but I could have got away without this.
As usual, soldering was carried out by tacking with the electric iron and then blowing the metal around with the gas flame. The localised heating of the later is very handy - running the solder along the cab front/bonnet top join I could see the handrail knobs starting to melt and take away the heat before it became liquid. Fantastic, and surprisingly easy.
If you are a beginner, it's worth bearing in mind that working with a tiny soldering iron is harder than a big one. The low power version will take a long while to heat up a lump of metal and because it's slow will need to bring nearly all the metal up to temperature. This is counter intuitive - you'd expect to be safer with less heat but in this case you'd be wrong.
1 comment:
As a beginner, I've recently learned exactly that and (with some local help) used a blowtorch rather than an iron on a Wrightlines chassis with encouraging success.
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