Bellows prep and dyeing plastic parts

Today I made use of my wood cutting list and cut and ripped a bunch of hardwood down to 1/4" and 1/2" thickness for various pieces. My plan is to get started on the bellows, so I wanted to make sure I got the battens for them glued in, so they can dry and be ready for sealing tomorrow. Since last weekend, the kitchen table has been a resting ground for the bellows cloth as I have it clamped/weighted to make the creases set.

Here are the middle bellows boards held with a small army of clamps while the glue dries overnight

While the glue dries, I thought I'd take care of a very minor bit of work, and transform my ugly white plastic gear and shaft bushing pieces into black pieces. I realize they won't be seen for the most part, but I really think the white plastic will stand out like a sore thumb in my overall design. The gears are for fitting the crank handle on the side instead of out the back - I read a posting about this crank handle modification, and I thought I'd try it. Of course I couldn't very well paint the white plastic pieces, as the movement friction would peel the paint away before long, so I found some interesting videos on YouTube where folks had successfully used Rit fabric dye to alter the color of plastic model parts without resorting to a paint coating.

Before...

 During.....

After...

The gears still need a little more work to make them look more like metal/ less like plastic, but I'll save that for another day.

Organizing the wood cutting into a list

With the weekend coming up, I'm looking forward to having more time for cutting wood and w working on the project. One thing that's a little awkward with the plans is that there's no conveniently centralized or organized list of materials, or lumber dimensions. I like to have things a little more organized, so I went over the plans several times and came up with a more detailed list of what I need in terms of wood cutting.

Here the list sorted by the corresponding page numbers on the plans:

And here it is sorted by thickness of wood:

Hopefully I can get most of the remaining wood cut this weekend!

Sticky Fingers

Got the bellows and reservoir card stiffeners glued in.

I haven't posted a video in a while, so if you're interested, here's a minute and a half of your life you'll never get back.

(Maybe the overly gaudy titles and snazzy music will make it somehow seem exciting.)

Spray Glue or Liquid Glue?

In preparation for doing the bellows cloth stiffeners, I wondered whether it would be better to use spray adhesive rather than the liquid wood glue that I'd been using for all of the wood parts.

The idea of a loose stiffener rattling around in the bellows years down the road didn't really excite me, and while I suspect that the liquid glue is superior in gluing wood pieces together, I wondered whether the spray adhesive might be less brittle and apt to work itself loose over time on something flexible like the bellows cloth.

Of course if the spray glue would be a stronger choice, then it would also speed up time in the gluing of the bellows stiffeners by cutting down on curing and clamping time significantly.

So, I decided to conduct a little experiment.

First I took a scrap of bellows cloth/blackout fabric and glued 2 pieces of cardboard stiffener scrap to it - One with the Titebond liquid glue, and one with the 3M #45 spray adhesive.

Then I clamped it between two boards and let it dry for 24hrs:

I put the test strip on a torture device that would cause the fabric to bend and stretch under each of the test cards:

After 20 minutes, the spray glue side showed no real signs of loosening:

While the liquid glue appeared to be letting loose slightly at the corners:

After an hour, the story had changed.
Here's the spray glue:

Here's the liquid glue:

So it looks like I'll be sticking (haha) with the original scheme of using plain old liquid glue. At least now I won't wonder if it was the best choice....

Marking the Bellows Cloth

I've been working on the bellows cloth today and taking care of some odd little things as well.


The bellows cloth I'm using is Roc-Lon blackout fabric - I got a yard of it for about $3.50. It's white on one side and ecru on the other, so I opted to put the stiffeners on the white side, in order to keep the more pleasant color on the visible side (I realize that it won't likely be seen by anyone but me). Also, I didn't want to risk gluing the cards to the colored, rubberized side.

Since the fabric had been stored folded, I thought it would be good to iron out the creases and wrinkles a little. I set the iron on medium to low heat, not wanting to melt or compromise the rubberized backing on the colored side.

I then set to work with the steel ruler, marking off guidelines for the stiffeners and for cutting the cloth to size:

Then I put the stiffeners in place just to make sure all of the measurements were correct:

I'm doing a glue test (spray glue vs. wood glue/PVA) to see which holds up better, so I'll check and test the samples tomorrow.

In the meantime, I thought I'd try out some hammered finish paint on my wooden spoked wheels: