Tuesday 28 June 2016

Improvisation

I've been rather lax in letting my stocks of styrene strip dwindle, which means that quite often at the moment I'm finding I don't have the right size just when I need it.

Such was the case the other day when I wanted to add a big, bendy pipe which sticks out of the big box underneath 117 and disappears up into the carriage.

In fact, that's a lie. I did have a small piece of the correct size tube but it was old and brittle and snapped when I attempted to put a 90 degree bend in it.

So what to do?

Eventually I had a brainwave. Speaker cable!


I sliced off a section of one half of cable, stripped out the multi-strand from inside, leaving just the soft sleeve and inserted brass wire in its place which could be bent to hold it in shape.


The sleeve was almost exactly the same diameter as the styrene tube I was going to use.


Fixed in place on the model it doesn't look half bad.

And it was an awful lot cheaper than buying a new packet of the right size styrene tube.

Result!

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