Large Scale Central

Thank you

Thanks go out to whichever one of you miscreants sent me this. We were talking about corrugation tools over the summer, and this just showed up on my doorstep.

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Wasn’t me Bob, but it looks very effective. Any indication of manufacturer?

Its the one from Rio Grande. Feels nice and heavy, Im gonna run some of the steel shim stock I have (.001 and .005) and see how it does.

Nice gift, bet you’ll get a few pounds of use out of that

Great! Please post on the results!

Works great on .005 steel shim stock.

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NICE!
(I just wish I could take credit! :innocent:)

Very cool. I like the steel - it will rust up perfectly!

Just in time to put a roof on the bunk house

That’s a nice miscreant to send something like that!

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Is this something someone is making and selling? Because I’d like to upgrade from my fiskers and do real steel.

https://www.riogrande.com/product/microfold-brake/115090

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Thanks Mick. Uf duh they know what want for them but I think its well worth the money if you make a habit of scratch build buildings.

That might just be my next purchase

I’m interested in the tool as well, thanks Bob.

There’s a similar product called a tube wringer, for pretty cheap.

I haven’t seen yet how thick of sheet steel (or anything else) it will handle. And it looks a lot harder on one’s wrist. Definitely not the higher quality product like you now have, but thought I’d bring it up.

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Speaking of metal tools, I will need to make several hundred grab handles for my SP Pullman project:

What sort of tool would you people recommend to do this properly?

Jewelers pliers. They make all kinds of pliers with differnt faces on them for wire bending. For what you are doing i use a pair that have stepped round jaws

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The other option is to make a jig. You take a piece of wood and drill a couple holes in it at the distance you want the inside of your bends to be. Insert a piece of wire the diameter you want you bends to be. Smaller wire makes tighter bends larger wire/rod makes larger diameter bends. Then you just form your wire around it. This makes it more repeatable than the pliers.

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That’s what I’m going for. When you say “just form” is that a finger operation (remember I only have 9) or would I use a pliers, perhaps the one shown above?

Just fingers. Use a soft wire like brass or copper. It bends easy with the fingers or you can use a small set of needle nose pliers.

You wouldn’t use the ones above. Another favorite pliers of mine are a pair of smooth jaw needle nose. They are great for bending wire around the form if you can’t do it with your fingers.

These

So the grab bars are silver/chrome on the prototype so I may need to use stainless or ??? My MTH
cars use 0.035" wire of some sort, that should be easy enough to bend, I think, perhaps it might be difficult to keep the inner radius tight enough…