Fenn Restoration |
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Frame Scraped |
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Doesnt look much, but read on................... On initial assembly of the bed and end frames I found that the legs splayed out three eights on an inch from vertical, then the left end frame ran out of square to the bed by a quarter of an inch. Initially I though, well its been like it for 150 years, who am I to change things, but then I had the problem of fitting the shepherds crooks and back-board onto an uneven out of square structure. Everything I know of engineering said that it needed to be sorted out. As they say you cant build anything well on a bad foundation and this qualified in that case. But although I am not scared of a bit of work, I could see I was heading for a lot of pain on this. as each frame weighs over half a hundredweight. So machining it was out of the question in a home workshop... why, well all normal machines move the bed to take cut, and this is way too big to fit on anything other than an industrial sized mill, then of course there is the issue of setting it up accurately enough to be correct first time.................
That being the case the only options left to me were to hand scrape them and thats where the "pain" part comes in. For this I used a three corner engineers scraper, a good one and engineers blue, with the frame on the bench and the bed blued up, it is then a case of lifting the bed onto it vertically, checking it for square and upright. For this I used a 12 inch precision square, then of course remove the bed, and scrape off the high spots, but only on the side or sides that are high and keeping it from being square. Well they say that patience is born of necessity and this is a prime case. It took me three and a half days to complete this, and I mean three and a half working days, needless to say there were a couple of times when the whole lot had to be cleaned and assembled to physically check things out. How many times I took the scraper to the oilstone I couldnt even guess, but its done now and its correct, as I said all it takes is patience and a pair of sore hands afterwards.............. |
