Lid catch

I went to the Industrial Metal Supply in Sun Valley to pick up some brass and other stuff so I could complete a couple of odds & ends here and there.

In one of the scrap bins I found some 5" brass sheet squares that seemed to be just under 1/16" thick.

I wanted to see how the brass would do with some cutting on the scroll saw, so I thought I'd finish my pressure box lid by making a brass catch plate for it.

I covered the edge of one of the square sheets with some frog tape, and cut out a rounded rectangle piece:

Then I drilled a pair of countersunk mounting holes, and cut a slot for the latch:

I removed the frog tape and re-taped it to the organ panel where the catch would be mounted to serve as a template for cutting a recess into the wood so the catch would sit flush. Here's what it looks like on the face side:

And here it is with the latch engaged, viewed from the back/crankcase side:

Idler wheel revision

Once I had put the res/bellows unit in place, I quickly realized that the interior con rod was hitting the idler wheel shaft, so I ended up putting a dogleg bend in the shaft and set its non-wheel end in a different location, well out of the path of the con rod - here you can see the old abandoned hole, and the new one just below and to the right.

Since bending the rod took away some of its length (and since I couldn't get a drill into that part of the crankcase), I drilled into a small scrap of hardwood and then attached the piece with a couple of screws:









Here's an exploded view of all of the idler wheel components:








Everything except the shaft and the spring go on the outside of the crank housing - the spring tension keeps everything in place:








Here's where things stand now: