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I cannot recall whether they came separately or whether the cast piston rod was so out of shape that I cut them off and drilled them out to accept a piece of rod. In any event not knowing any better I had used brass rather than nickel of anything that remotely looked steel like. As soon as I picked them up, I decided that they had to go. So initially I planned to use some nickel rod.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Unfortunately, my 2mm nickel rod is in fact 1.86mm so was very sloppy fit in all the holes. I also had 2.25mm and I did attempt to turn it down but ended up with multiple fine steps which wouldn\u2019t fit either. However, what I do have is some 2mm ground silver steel so I cut a couple of pieces and used that. I used Bakers Fluid as flux and soldered them in. Although a reasonable fit in the holes in the cross heads I found that getting the piston rod \u2018square\u2019 in all planes was a bit if a trial. Made slightly more awkward by the fact that the drop links are a separate item soldered on so I had to be careful that I didn\u2019t have them fall off as I soldered the piston rods in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After initially soldering the piston rods in and finding that they didn\u2019t runs smoothly due to being slightly out in one plane or another I hit upon the ide of fitting the cross heads into the slide bars then I gripped the drop link in a pair of pliers so that it didn\u2019t move and then I slipped a pair of self-locking tweezers over the slide bars where the cross head was (with the piston rod fed into the gland at the other end). I then used the Microflame to heat the crosshead\/piston rod joint, until the solder started to melt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then, as the solder melted again there was a satisfying click, the self-locking tweezers pulled the cross head into line with the slide bars and with the piston rod being held in line in the gland, it made everything line up in all planes. When cooled, the cross head\/piston rod runs very smoothly indeed. A quick rinse and repeat for the other side had both crossheads running nicely. I think that when I assemble the rest of the motion, I may need to shorten the piston rods a little but I will wait until later in the build to determine that for certain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now that I have largely scratched my gear cutting itch, I returned to the 8F in the last couple of days. Starting with revisiting the chassis. First, I resoldered a couple of bits of the cylinder wrappers where they had … Continue reading <\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"