Thursday 28 January 2010

In the Distant


North East Area Group meeting information.
Saturday 6th February 2010
Saint Barnabas Church Hall, Bournmoor.
Time - Please Note 2.00pm – 5.00pm. (approx.)

Recently I was asked to put on my EM Gauge Society hat and do a demonstration at my local area group meeting in the Scottish borders on how I made some stock boxes from cardboard.

I accepted and assessed what the necessary materials would cost. The cost of card and the covering paper, whilst not particularly expensive precluded the cardboard approach to card stock boxes in 4mm scale. So I gave the organiser of that group an option and he decided to accept my supposition that maybe the EM boys might not want to make their own boxes when there may well be a commercial product available for the same or similar outlay. However that is not necessarily the case in relation to 2 millimetre scale. It got me thinking that quite a good while ago now, I made some similar boxes from card and they have proved to be surprisingly strong and are still in daily use. So, never being one to miss a topic for our group meetings, at the next meeting I will be showing everyone how I built stock boxes for items of 2mm rolling stock using card.

If anyone wants to partake then bring along some reasonable quality card, mounting card is ideal, a pencil, and some paper to cover the construction, a sharp scalpel blade, a steel ruler or straight edge, some white wood glue, and have a rough idea of how big a box you want to make. As a guide, if the box to be made measures 6” x 4” x 2” then a sheet of card 18” square should be ample. In fact that might even make a smaller box as well.

So far as covering paper is concerned, it could be possible to use sheets from almost any old magazine. The drawback with this is you will need to paint it afterwards. Like me you may prefer to go to one of those handy craft shops and buy a sheet of coloured paper for about £1.00 which will finish the job off nicely. The results do not necessarily have to be used for stock and as an illustration of this the one I will be making on the day will be for my set of ER16 collets that I bought recently from ebay for use on my Unimat 3.


So there you are – it’s going to be a bit like a Blue Peter program - except they don’t have pizzas and corned beef pies for their tea………!

Mick S

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