Ho Ho Ho Train repair

'Tis the season to dig out cheaply made decorations.

After a year badly packed in a box there will soon be requests to "stick this back together". Sometimes it's really handy having a model maker around the place !

The model shown is a train (no surprise there) made of wood. Sadly, one of the wheels has fallen off. Many people would just ignore this or just throw the thing in the bin. The environmentalist in me, bolstered by the cheapskate, says this is wrong. Why chuck away a perfectly good decoration when a simple repair would render it as good as new ?

Obviously the first thought was just to glue the wheel to the carriage. I fancied doing a proper job though, and since the wheels rotate, decided that they still should.

The wheels are held in place with wooden rivets and the problem is that one of them is missing. I found a bit of dowel sort of the same diameter as the rivet head. A length of this was put in the chuck of my electric screwdriver and set spinning. Holding a Xacto -saw blade on it marked the bottom of the head.

Next I held the workpeice (look, proper terminology, get Model Engineer Mag on the phone !) in the chuck and carefully carved away the stalk. Finally a spin with a coarse file and then sandpaper finished the job. All that remained was to glue it in the hole, pop some gold paint on and the decoration was as good as new.

Total time, probably half an hour because I wasn't in a hurry. Satisfaction - pretty good.