![]() If you accidentally leave the lid off the Tenax bottle (like I've done now and then), the stuff will be all but gone the next day - so be careful! Tenax7R is a little slower working than MEK, and it evaporates more quickly. Tenax7R is less smelly than straight MEK and includes solvents that work with ABS plastic as well as styrene. They all melt the styrene slightly to weld the joints together. Tenax7R and Tester's Styrene cement in the bottle (not the tube stuff) are all alcohol like solvents that flow easily and evaporate quickly. ![]() The A-West bottles all come with a small wire to unclog the needle if it's ever needed. MEK is a solvent that flows easily and evaporates quickly. Get the smallest A-West needle you can get. If you want the bridge to look nice, building them can take some time! ![]() I estimate kitbashing really small steel truss bridges out of styrene would take several weeks to build, while larger bridges can go into months of spare time to build, paint, and install. Here some truss bridges on my Siskiyou Line: Kitbashed steel truss bridges take a lot longer to build because there's a lot of cutting and fitting involved, plus even building the raw trusses takes a while. The Central Valley bridge kit and the MicroEngineering tall steel trestle kits provide great truss pieces you can kitbash into realistic looking styrene truss bridges. I also use similar techniques to kitbash steel truss bridges. Using these tools, I can scratchbuild a styrene trestle quickly, it comes out looking very nice, and it's *strong* - far stronger than a basswood trestle. I use a jig for building the trestle bents, and I use a Northwest Shortline Chopper II to cut the styrene pieces. With just 1/4 of the bottle full, you can go from joint to joint precisely placing a drop of MEK just about as fast as you can move, and it sets up in about 30 seconds or so. Only fill the A-West bottle about 1/4 full, since the more MEK you put in the faster it comes out. Personally, I prefer straight MEK - it sets up faster and you can find it pretty cheap in hardware stores. It's essentially MEK, with a few other additives that make it slower. You can also get it from Testors in the black bottle with a needle applicator, but they'll charge you $7 for a tiny supply. You can get a 10 year supply (1 quart) for less than $10. I use regular MEK (Methyl Ethyl Ketone) from the hardware store. One of the things I recommend is you get an A-West Needle point glue applicator. I've been building bridges out of stryrene for years and have developed a lot of techniques for making it fast and easy. The bridge I'm building on the video is a curved trestle, built completely out of stryrene. ![]() I think this is sad news for the hobby particularly for the builders and tinkerers.Interesting you should bring this up because I am in the middle of filming the bridges chapter on my upcoming scenery and bridges DVD. Guys who are into a "labor of love" are not plentiful. Someone with those skills can probably name their price in other lines of work. Maybe that is why the business is going to be hard to sell: if MicroMark siphons off the low hanging fruit that makes the money, the rest of the business may not look attractive enough even if the person has the precision machine shop smarts to run the existing products and introduce new ones. The real loss for the hobby will be the many things NWSL offers that nobody else does (or perhaps, can) including the gears and drop in replacements for various diesels etc. But it is significant that the Chopper 2 did not eliminate the Chopper 1 from their catalog or offerings, so they clearly saw it as an alternative not a replacement.Īs others have noted MicroMark has offered some knockoffs of certain NWSL tools, and some of the NWSL tools are things you could make yourself - indeed the Chopper is an adaptation of a home made tool written up in MR decades and decades ago. But then again, I think many things that turn out not to be so. I actually prefer cutting/chopping on the solid base rather than one that yields a little. I still get good service out of my Chopper 1 which is the only one they offered when I bought it. Chopper 2 has a self healing mat instead of masonite. I have the Chopper 1 and at some point I suppose I will have the problem others have experienced - the masonite base gets a permanent gouge where the blade hits. ![]()
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