Cherry Scale Models 12" Rolling Bar

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IMO you can make boilers and tank cars.

Andre.

Pasta, pie crust, and wringing out the delicate undies....

Hi Tim, Yeah, AG is right. If there's another roller out of sight in the picture behind these, you can use it to bend or roll flat stock into circular shapes and diameters of any size. There should be a crank handle for one of the roller ends. If there's no instructions with it, start with some thin flat scrap brass and experiment with doing different diameters. Nice score!

I remember these coming out in England, maybe 30 years ago.

Then, as now, a great deal of 0 Gauge modelling was from etched brass or nickel silver kits and as has been mentioned, boilers needed to be rolled.

The other useful accomplishment is roofs for locomotive cabs and passenger cars and freight vans.   The bars cannot cope with small diameters which must be done another way, by rolling round a small round bar, for example.

The trick is to have, say, half a dozen passes, adjusting the rollers a little each time, until one has formed the correct curvature.  Do not try and do it all in one go, but a step at a time.

Once the locomotiver bouler has been formed properly, it is necessary to partially dismantle the rollers, by removing the top roller so as to release the now tubular piece of rolled brass, carefully align the join, tie a bit of soft iron wire round to hold it together and then sweat the joint to make it sound.

In fact, tinning what will become the inside face either side of the join before rolling will help a lot with the very long boilers you use on some of your engines.

But, the rollers allow a precise and accurate job without distortion - unless you try to use too few steps.

Marty

I seem to remember that Cherry introduced a longer version, to deal with passenger car roofs which I think was 18" long.

The point was that a aprchaser most likely wanted to use a single set of rollers for all their sheet metal forming, since it was a relativily expensive tool and the desire for it to be as versatile as possible was natural.

The problem was that the long rollers were more flexible and therefore it became necessary to use the rollers more gently by increasing the number of passes during the forming process.   Nevertheless, once you've use this thing, you wouldn't be without it.

I presume something in the way of a very short version is available in the USA to form curves in rails, perhaps with grooves in the rollers to accommodate the web and head of the rail.   This would be especially useful for consistently preforming rail when making a batch of turnouts.

Fast Tracks makes such a roller.  Brad Strong uses it in making his Signature switches

I appreciate the number of comments I received concerning the usage of this piece of equipment.  I know at this time I will not be using this 12" rolling bar (with hand crank) still sealed in its original package.  I am going to sell this 12" rolling bar assemble for $85.00 plus $15.00 postage.  If interested you can email me or contact me at 618-286-4795