Building week 4 - first wing finished

Over the weekend I tried the suggestion with the leather strip to even out the friction over all the separate pivoting feathers. I'm quite happy with how it works.

Then, the rest of the week I spent filing things down, rounding off edges, and assembling the new hinge joint for the upper arm/elbow. A lot of silver soldering this week, as so far all parts had still been loose and only attached where been held by screws. I had to silver solder all the pins in the lower arm part and in the other joints as well. This took some practice.

Still needing some more practice...

Some improvement, most pins are fixed now.

It was quite a tedious work: cutting really tiny bits of silver solder to fit in the tiny holes where the pin was pushed halfway through the hole, and let it flow in there exactly to make a bond between the pin and the plate. You can see I had some problems with this in the beginning... I tried after the first efforts if it would work better making longer pins and actually have them sticking out so I could have the silver solder fitting around it instead of just on top, giving more surface area for the bond. But this proved to be only more difficult to get right, so I went back to the first method, which I got working in the end.

Me silver soldering.

I mainly still used the brazing torch for the silver soldering. I tried using the smaller Dremel torch that gets less hot, but because I was often using clay to hold things in place it seemed like this was taking away some of the heat, for which reason I could not get it hot enough with this tool. I could point the Dremel torch on the piece as long and close as I wanted, but just simply nothing would happen... With the brazing torch it is easy to get it too hot, but I just tried to be careful, not pointing it directly onto the piece for too long.

Applying flux where the pins have to be soldered in the holes.

On the picture above you can see the first of the 'finger' joints of the wing. I used clay so I could have the pins in place while soldering. I didn't do this with the part for the lower arm and it turned out that some pins were slightly shifted. This made it impossible to have both parts fitting together. In the end I could solve the problem by making the holes from the plate they had to fit into slightly bigger. This wasn't ideal though, so therefore I decided to do it differently for the other parts and this worked out well. It is not easy working with clay to hold parts, as of course it dries out quickly and in some cases then bursts and flies in all directions (extra reason why it's a good idea to wear safety goggles...). I just had to hope every time that it would hold long enough to allow me to solder the parts together. I couldn't find any other way to hold the pieces together in this small scale. Sometimes it caused the whole thing to get quite messy, as all the clay bits would get onto the part I was soldering... Not the ideal method clearly, but so far it seems to work out.

More soldering after this. The hinge joint had to be soldered together and the balls had to be soldered onto the rods. Even though I had been warned that soldering ball bearings onto rods can be tricky, I found this to be quite easy compared to all the tricky bits of soldering I had been facing so far.

Hinge joint being soldered.

Soldering the ball onto the rod. Finished/cleaned up one in the background.

Picture above shows the soldering of ball bearings onto the rod. I used the method Mary gave me advice on weeks ago: making a circle of silver solder to fit around the rod and let that flow into the hole. Ryan gave me a short demonstration the first time and it all worked out quite well. This was one of the things I preferred to use the smaller Dremel torch for, as it gave me more control over the small thing and allowed me to watch it being closer. Because there was not clay or other complicated constructions to hold the parts together I could get it hot enough with this smaller flame. When possible I choose to solder the ball onto the full length of the rod and then cut it off, so I could just hold the rod or even let it rest against a brick while soldering (but holding it allowed me to turn it around while soldering, making it easier to heat up all sides evenly.

Pretty much all parts are there to be put together now... Just connecting the different joints now where they have to be soldered together...

And there is the result of the first wing, finished on friday... Yay :)