Trussed Up

I've never been much of a bender - you don't really need to be working mainly in styrene - so doing the brass bits on the carriages, like the truss rods, has never been my favourite task. It's never been the swiftest, either, come to that.

I've discovered over the years that I don't have the knack for estimating how much I need to bend a piece of wire to get the angle I need, and go through a repeated process of bending, offering it up to the drawing, reducing or increasing the angle, offering it up again and discovering I've gone too much the other way.....and so it continues.

Eventually I end up with two matching truss rods which are super-glued in place on their styrene supports with each end poked through holes drilled in the floor.



Because this carriage is being built in 7mm scale I thought I had better have a go at including a detail that I've always left off my 4mm models. (That adjusting thingy in the middle that I confess I don't actually know the name of.)

I spent a wee while searching on the web to see if I could find anyone who produces these as a component, without any success, but it probably didn't help that I didn't know the right name to search for.

So I fabricated my own from styrene strip and fitted them in the middle of the truss rods.