More Small Cannon Parts

by John

I suspect that this post will not be of much interest.

But the parts represent 2 whole days in the workshop, so I am writing these notes for my own diarising more than your entertainment.

The chassis of the model Armstrong RML cannon has a cross bar, which is bolted to the longitudinal bar, and is attached to the side girders with some small, shaped clamps.

On the original Port Fairy cannon. There is a 4º difference between the girders and the central bar.

The crossbar is under the big gear. Still some shaping required to improve the appearance. When I have finished the gaps will disappear. The difference between the original and the model cross bar relates to pragmatics of shaping miniatures. Compromises inevitable. And if you noticed, the fasteners on the left are BA8, and 2mm cap screws on the right. I need to buy more BA8’s.

The cross bar doesn’t look much, but it has 4 bends and a twist. The space was too tight for me to measure the angles, so I bent the cold bar by estimating the degrees by eye. Same with the twist, except that the twist had to be confined to the section not attached to the girder or the central longitudinal bar. So I heated that to red heat with oxypropane. The twist was 4º. But I eye balled that too.

8BA bolts x6 in a hex pattern join the cross bar to the longitudinal bar.

The clamps required some planning. I considered machining them from solid bar, but work-holding was going to be problematic.

So I silver soldered 2 strips together, cut off the pieces, then sanded, filed, and manually bent the angles.

The silver soldered join overlaps by only 2mm, but it survived some aggressive bending. 100mm long. The parts were sawn off, then further sanding, filing, and hole drilling. Workshop dirty fingers with swollen arthritic joints.

p.s. Another day later, more of the same…

This is the underside of the model Armstrong cannon carriage. I have bolted on the 4 cast bronze fittings which hold the carriage onto the chassis. Later those fittings will have wooden/steel disks sandwiched and bolted onto them to become bumpers at the extremes of travel of the carriage on the chassis. All of the cap screws will be replaced later by hex head BA bolts.
this is a view of the underside of the chassis, with the carriage secured above. An unusual view.

I would prefer to use 2mm metric bolts rather than 8BA, which is a similar diameter and pitch, but unfortunately I have been unable to find a supplier of 2mm bolts with hex heads. BA bolts are several times more expensive per piece than metric, and it adds up when using hundreds per cannon.