Something for the weekend, Sir? Origami, perhaps?

Doubtless our illustrious leader Toto will be sitting in a tin box listening to the rain (or Hailstones), rattling on the roof this Bank holiday weekend, standard weather indeed for a UK Bank holiday! Whilst I've also been sitting at the workbench in my loft railway room, listening to the rain beating on the Velux window, I've been busy knocking out a couple of dozen carriage connecting bellows for my carriage stock, using nothing more expensive than a sheet of black 'Windsor' art paper (£1.30 from my nearest "Range" store), and a bit of glue. Herewith my "How-To" for those interested. Below is a pic of what we are trying to create, a flexible bellows, hopefully somewhat similar to the genuine article as fitted to coaching stock over many years, certainly during the early 60's period I model on my layout.

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Another view, which hopefully shows the flexible 'bellows' a bit better.

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So for my particular coach stock, a mixture of Lima/Hornby, and EMU/DMU stock mostly Bachmann, a dimension of 15mm wide and 30mm high fits quite well onto those items which have what could loosely be described as a mounting frame or boss on the carriage ends. Basically, it's a matter of measuring what you have and perhaps modifying the dimensions to suit, all my stuff is 00 gauge, but dimensions could be easily altered to suit our growing number of 0 gauge members, also N gauge, although that would likely be quite fiddly to make. I'm aware that there is at least one maker of Laser cut versions of these bellows, but if you have a fair number of coach/EMU/DMU stock like me, it could get a bit expensive, so this is a very economical way to do it. For my size bellows, each set requires 2 of 30mmx60mm and 2 of 15mmx30mm pieces of the aforementioned art paper thus.

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The 2 15mmx30mm pieces are the bellows ends, to be glued on last of all, so putting those aside for the moment, you need to mark a 30mmx60mm piece up so you have 4 equal sections of 15mm x 30mm, then using the back of a craft knife, score the 3 marked divisions so that the card will fold into an 'M' shape (or maybe a 'W' shape if you're upside down in the Southern Hemisphere?)

Now do the same with the second piece of card, thus.

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Now taking one of the folded cards, mark a central line down the end of the folded card, and cut through all the folded thicknesses, from centre to top, so that all 4 'folds' have a slot cut from middle to top of the card. Take the second folded card, mark down the centre of one end, and again cut through all folded thicknesses, but this time from centre to bottom. Although black card is difficult to photograph in detail, hopefully this pic will show what I mean.

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Next step is to assemble the 2 cards together, interlocking them together thus:-

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Then take the two 15mmx30mm pieces we put aside, and glue one to each end of the compressed bellows. Don't go too heavy with the glue here, you don't want the bellows to stick together. If you've understood what I've been waffling about, you should have something resembling this in the pic below.

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If you wish, you can 'chamfer' the top corners of the bellows, as I've done here, but this is optional. All that remains is to fit it onto your rolling stock end, only one end per stock item is needed. I glue the bellows here, using either "Blu-Tack' or "Tacky Wax" to fix the other side of the bellows onto the adjacent rolling stock, that way you can easily remove individual items of rolling stock, as you don't want to have to take an entire train off the track in one piece, just to get at one item. Finally a pic showing my "Brighton Belle" with bellows fitted. Being flexible, they close up the gap nicely on straight track, opening up the bellows on bends. Effective and cheap, so this'll find you something to do on a wet Bank holiday!
Keith.

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Thanks for that Chris, the iPhone camera isn't the best thing to show closeup detail, and I'm not IT techy enough to be able to fiddle with it in software and make it better. Much appreciated!
Keith.