This last week has been one of those where you don’t really know where the time went and workshop sessions were of short duration. Which for me, isn’t really conductive to problem solving on the 8F although I did manage a little bit of problem solving and moving ahead with it as my last post confirms. Like many model builders I use a lot of small BA screws which means that I also use small flat headed screwdrivers. For some time for the smaller 10BA/12BA/14BA screws I have relied on a screwdriver from a three piece set which was sold for the repair of spectacles. It consisted of a small flat head, crosspoint and a handle which I assume was designed to be a nut spinner but rather than machined I have a feeling it was cast because the internal hex was oddly shaped and I never found a nut that would fit in it. More on that later. As I say I mainly use the flat head but I had misplaced it and needing something relatively quick to do I wondered if I might make a replacement from some 2mm silver steel that I have a reasonable stock of (as often happens you plan to buy a length of it but it works out only a little more to buy a pack of five). Making the blade took about fifteen minutes I held the length of Silver Steel in a square collet block and milled down each side for a short distance to make the blade shape then I heated it to cherry red and dunked it in my olive oil jar before reheating to temper it. The handle was made from a piece of recycled rod from an old printer. I chose a length which had previously had some plastic gears fitted to it that were held on by splines. I reasoned that the splines would provide grips without further need of any additional work. There was a grooved section in between the splines so I turned a slight taper on the edges to make them more comfortable in the hand and allow me to blue where I had turned it to give a little decoration. All in all it took around half an hour to make both blade and handle. At this point Chris said that she could do with a replacement screwdriver for her sewing machine so I made a second one but I guesstimated the size a little on the big side so it wouldn’t fit. It turned out that the first one that I made was perfect for the sewing machine so I gave that one to Chris and kept the chunkier one for my own use – it’s perfect for 6BA or bigger screws. So then I needed to make another smaller screwdriver for myself to replace the one that gave Chris. I did things a little different in so much as I put a 5 degree angle block under the collet block ad instead of milling from the side I milled from above this gave me much more control over the final blade thickness at the tip. Using both ends of the bar I made two blades one with a tip thickness of 0.25mm and the other with a thickness of 0.5mm Using the same splined rod for the handles as the first one albeit that there wasn’t two sets of splines near enough to each other that I had to add a bit of knurling and a few grooves to help with grip again I blued the exposed areas that I had turned as I find that these printer rods rust easily if I don’t blue them. Finally a couple of days later I made another blade and I drilled out the useless nut spinner mentioned above to make a handle so now I might get some actual use from it after it has sat on my bench for at least 10 years without ever having been used.
