Now that my Bolster wagons are nearing completion my thoughts turned to loading it and by good fortune my good lady had recently trimmed out apple trees. So I found a couple of stout branches amongst the offcuts which looked like they might make suitable timber loads.

The next thing was how to tie them down and I decided to have a go to see if I could make some screw shackles – think screw couplings without the hook for the vehicle body.

I started by making what I call the trunnions and centre pins lots of small turnings. Some of them were cross drilled using my Proxxon mini pillar drill. The major diameter of the rod is 2mm and to centre the drill on the part, I popped a 2mm drill bit in the chuck upside down and dropped that in between the vice jaws.

I made the bob weights from 1.6mm rod which was turned down to 1mm nominal for the shaft but in hindsight I should have made them a little bit thinner.

I drilled and them cross drilled more 2mm rod to make the bob weight collars but since making these I experimented with making the collar and centre pin as one piece and in future when I make more I shall do that as soldering the bob weight in, and then soldering it central on the shaft was a bit of a pain.

The final piece was a small washer to retain the other trunnion.

And with the obligatory 5p piece for scale. magnified so much the solder looks a bit messy but it’s barely visible at normal viewing distances.

Finally I had to make up the D shackles so I made a bending jog to ensure that they were all pretty much the same size.

The jig is made from another redundant plug pin with holes drilled in to determine the length between bends with short lengths of 0.8mm piano wire loctited in to create the pivot points. The observant amongst you will note that initially I drilled a third hole to insert a tail to start the initial bend but after doing the first one I realised that it was much more efficient to make the first bend with a fine pair of round nosed pliers then placed the formed eye on the jig to bend the other end.

I made four pairs in this session of making them. All that remain are hooks to attach to the chains.