Over the last few show demos I have been slowly building a pair of Connoisseur LNER Single Bolster wagons. At Embsay Hunslet event last weekend I got to the point of soldering on the axle guards in anticipation of getting them up on their wheels when a minor disaster struck.

Prior to I had popped the bearings in the holes to ensure that the holes were deep enough but what I hadn’t noticed was that the holes themselves were not at right angles to the axle guards.

In my ignorance I soldered a pair of axle guards onto one side of each wagon but when I slipped the axles in ready to solder the other side on I found that the axles were sat at a jaunty axle. It was at this point that I realised that I didn’t have the right sized drill bit with me to attempt to straighten the hole

When I got home I had the thought that a suitable sized burr might be better than a drill bit to straighten the hole so I bought a set of burrs via Amazon and planned to use the 2.5mm to do the job. They were not expensive £8 for the set but I figure they will be good enough to work on whitemetal.

Once I fitted the burr in my Proxxon Mini Pillar drill I realised that with the axle guards fitted to the wagon body the chuck would hit the body stopping me from being able to drill in the correct place. At this point I had two choices I could either remove the axle guards to drill them out or make an arbor to hold the burr further away from the chuck. I chose the latter route as being the easiest.

I made an arbor from a piece of 6mm rod recycled from an empty toner cartridge. Drilling a 3.25 mm hole in one end and cross drilling and tapping M3 for a couple of grub screws

Then using a couple of bits of coffee stirrer to support the casting level I set up to realign the holes.

Using the depth stop on the mini pillar drill I was able to straighten and make the holes slightly deeper without drilling through the face of the axleboxes