After I got the plates I soon realized that something had gone wrong. Material was missing on the plates and the odd thing was that it wasn´t in the same places on some of the plates i.e. the front plates. It turned out somehting had gone wrong when converting the CAD files to the dxf files but I had no program to view these files before sending them to the cutting company and my CAD friend failed to notice.
Talk about disapointment - I thought it´d be plain sailing from now on after all the work on the CAD drawings. I was very close to give up as I feared it would be very hard and time consuming to add (thin in some places) material and then machine these areas.
In the end I decided to give it a go and see how things turned out. Besides from adding material I also had to machine the thickness on almost all the plates to get the correct scale thickness. As my milling machine has a fixed head I bought a 3-way vice and a digital protractor and without these I wouldn´t have been able to machine the plates.
I didn´t take that many photos as I had my hands full but two of the first was these;
I´ve machined parts of the front plate and the lower front to be able to put them in place. On the front I´ve written comments on missing material. The rear looked like this;
Next step was to work on bottom plates, the lower sides and the square bar (that holds the suspension bearings) to be able to screw them together;
In the photo below I´ve done a lot work and now started trying to work out where to fix the upper side walls in the right position, held in place with plastic pieces;
For those with sharp eyes you can see I´ve written -12 on the side plates which means that it´s missing 12 mm. I also had to mark out where the mudguard brackets are to be (B) to avoid putting a screw (A) in this position. I´ve added extra material to the upper and the side of the front plate.
In the next photo I´ve fixed the upper side plates and is trying out the superstructure front and rear plates;
and also worked on superstructure rear plate;
I´ve added a thin strip on top of the rear plate and noted that I had to add a 5 mm piece to the rear of the roof plate. B is the square bar for the supension bearings.
A heavy thing to work on was the superstructure front and I decided to rework the lower part to closer represent the original (which is cast as one piece);
A thick piece is added on the lower part and I´ve machined and filed the sides. I had to add a piece to the top as well and then remove parts of it;
I worked on the 12 mm added material on the lower edge on the upper sideplates plus added and machined other parts;
To add material I either glued and screwed it or nailed and glued it, like this;
Below is a combination of both using nails and screws to fix the extra material;
and this is what it the same part of the front plate looks like from behind;
The next photo show how I worked on the top of the upper side plates and that meant I had managed to pull it off and I am pleased I didn´t give up. Hopefully the added material won´t show when it comes to painting but at least you´ll know if they will.
Cheers Per