Further to my last post, when the brass bearings arrived I knocked one up into a lubricator to see how I would do it.

It was a bit interesting drilling out the bearing but following advice given I got a short length of tube the same diameter as my bearing and made a slit in it to make a split collet. This I gripped in one of the collets on the lathe and then I centre drilled it. Followed by drilling right through. They are slippery little blighters and one flew off into space as I was attempting to load into the lathe collet. Surprisingly I found it a couple of hours later.

I was fortunate to have some 1mm square bar in stock so I drilled right through one way and then half way on one side. When I fitted the rod through the bearing and into the square section I filed half of it away for the last millimetre which gave me a bit more room to solder the piece in that goes into the boiler.

With the obligatory scaling piece.

As with all such things in modelling making one is sometimes the easy part making another or several is more difficult. So it proved with the second one

I ruined one bearing when I hadn’t quite tightened the collet enough and the bearing wasn’t centred, then I didn’t get enough solder on the cross pipe so that came adrift as I cut it short and I ended up having to re-drill it in the pillar drill before I could solder it back in.

But get a pair I did. My collection of bits for the D2 is slowly coming together.