I’m trying to make a grill for a t-26 air intake/engine compartment vent/whatever that thing is. it’s in the dead center of this photo here in between the two charming gentlemen:
it’s basically a frame with lots of parallel flat thin rectangular pieces. they’re too thin for styrene in 1/35 scale so i’m making them out of brass sheet strips. the complication is that they’re at an angle so i can’t just stack and align them easily. so far i’ve tried holding the strip in place with a shim and gluing it -| thusly to the wall with superglue but that’s a pain. i also tried cutting it a bit too long, heating the brass up and cutting that into the sides of the frame while it’s hot. that one’s a bit iffy since it warps the frame a bit. I was thinking of cutting it too long and bending the tips at a right angle which would give a good gluing surface and help space the strips but that seems like it needs too much precision for cutting (maybe i’m just lazy). any suggestions for a simpler way?
Brass of course will work but is harder to cut. Plastic cuts and glues much easier. Have a look at Evergreen strips. They come in a wide variety of sizes and thicknesses. I have some nearly paper thin. You will need some sort of a jig to cut the strips to length so they are all exactly the same. Cut the 2 side pieces long and pin them to a work surface, a nice flat piece of wood should work well. Glue in 2 slats to get the right width of the sides.
Make as many slats as you need plus a few extras, cut double the amount if the slat thickness and space is the same size. Make the second “half” of the batch what ever thickness they need to be to make the right size opening. Make the spacers shorter so there is no chance of them being accidentally glued. Set up a block of some sort so the first slat is at the proper angle and glue the slat in place. Alternate spacers and slats and glue each slat as you go. The spacers should slide right out.
Regardless of material (although this works better with styrene) make the slats deeper than you need. Take a small block of wood shorter than the width of your sheet stock strips. Razor saw parallel grooves in it at the proper angle and spacing for the slats. Make a second block of wood identical to the first. Fasten the blocks down so that the grooves in each block are parallel and facing each other, and the bottoms of the grooves are separated by the width of the grill. Slide sections of stock into the parallel grooves. Glue or solder (if brass or metal) the frame to the portion of the stock slats that sticks out above the edge of the blocks. Once the glue has set, carefully razor saw the finished grill free of the extra slat material while it is still in the blocks.
I’d try making a jig to hold the pieces in place before gluing or soldering things together.
The easiest approach that comes to mind is to use foam or clay to hold the pieces in place. For foam, use your hobby knife to make cuts that would then hold the slats; getting the proper angle may be problematic. For clay, push the pieces in enough so that they’re held in place but far enough out that they can be glued (or at least tacked) together; how much clay residue would end up on parts and how to remove it might be an issue though.
Another option would be to make a comb by pushing pins into a block of foam at the proper angle to get the alignment of the slats, and then glue on the sides.
You probably won’t like my answer but I found it was easiest just to be patient and fit each one, I had to scratch the grill on this dozer (it comes as a flat piece with a decal [:(] ) and that is how I did it, I fooled around with a couple of ideas but in the end I just fit and glued one slat at a time.
