| >> I want to create reasonably accurate rain gutters for the buildings I'm | >> modeling. I could use some of the commercial injection moldings sold for | >> that purpose, but every one I've seen is unrealistically thick. Which leads | >> me to use thin-walled brass channel. That's fine for square gutters, but | >> many buildings (in fact, most in the steam era) had round gutters so I'd | >> need to cut a piece of tubing in half. | >
| >Here's a top-of-my-head idea: how about if a guy were to take the tubing | >and embed it halfway in a piece of scrap wood by means of a small knife | >or chisel cut? Then said guy could carefully grind off the top half of | >the tubing, working across the length of it, say with a small wheel in a | >Dremel, with the tool clamped to the workbench and sliding the work past it. | >
| >It might help if a guy were to run a piece of wire (soft copper, say) | >through the tubing first, then grind both the tubing and wire. | >
| >It would be a pain in the ass, but it might work. The result would be | >pretty rough, so you'd have to clean it up with a file afterwards. | | Another solution is to collect a few scrap umbrellas and use the ribs. | Keith
Sitting in the basement using all of the remaining memory cells in my aging brain I'm trying to picture the size of the ribs and thinking that they're about twice as big as I'd need for HO: roughly 1/8" to the foot so a 1/16" channel would represent a 6" gutter. I don't believe that umbrellas are that flimsy but, hey, there are some pretty cheap ones out there. It's not a bad idea to look in the trash bin for raw materials and it could come in useful later. Norm