Episode 4:
Once all the other blanks were formed correctly, I continued to the final steps of checking and adjusting. As hard as I try to get these all square and flat every time, I am not always 100% successful, and in any case the process itself introduces little deviations that need correcting. The tools now are pliers and files and a horribly rusty old engineer’s square that has spent too much of its life too close to acid flux!
Sometimes the two “legs of the bracket are not exactly parallel after bending, as seen by the light showing under the end of this one:
I grab the motor face in a pair of pliers and tweak the offending leg a little until the bottom faces of the bracket all sit flat on my building jig.
Then I focus on the motor mounting face. It is important in my opinion to be sure that the face where the motor will mount is completely flat, as one does not want to risk deforming the motor of the bracket when screwing the motor in, as this could cause friction in the moving parts later on. So, I place the bracket over an index finger and draw file the mounting face.
As you can see, the punching and bending have deformed the surface somewhat, so it needs to be filed until the file marks spread across at least all of the area where the motor will touch:
This one is fine, that little bit at the bottom won’t make any difference.
You can see that I have also rounded off the top rear corners of the bracket. Sometimes I do that while the strips are still flat:
But most times I wait until the forming is done, as a square end makes the marking of the hole positions easier and the bending process a bit more accurate. At this point in the process, either a flat file or the belt sander can be used, I generally just round them off with a flat file.
Once the mounting face is filed flat, then use a square to ensure that the legs are nicely at 90 degrees to the mounting face. Hold the face in a good pair of pliers and tweak the legs as needed.
If weight is not a prime concern, then the brackets can be used like this. However sometimes it is nice to lose a little bit of high-up weight, so I mark a section and trim it out of the motor mounting face:
The nifty tool for this is a nibbler, but I guess it could be done with a small hacksaw and file as well. After the majority of the material is nibbled away, I clean up the edges with a flat file again. This cut-out is advantageous when the motor has a pinion that is bigger than 6mm, not that this happens often with 1/32 scale inline cars, but on the 1/24 Retro cars it does. The cutout allows the motor to be removed without having to remove the pinion.
So that’s it, a nice little inline bracket. Or in my case, a whole lot of nice little inline brackets:
Altogether, with the time taken for photographing (and measuring twice!), this batch took about two hours to make. Yes, I guess I could buy them from JK or elsewhere, but to me, this is part of the fun of scratchbuilding, and has fueled my obsession with tools too! I just have to have the tools!
I hope this was instructive and enjoyable.
Dennis