Roxey Mouldings ICI hopper part 5 - hopper 1.

Attention now turns to the hopper body. This is drawn as a single piece and should fold up as is. However, the floor has been drawn too wide, which means that there are gaps at the bottom of the body where the sides meet the ends. The solution, which is covered in the instructions, is to cut the body into 4 sections as below;

Easy work with a piercing saw with a fresh blade fitted. There are a series of half-etched rivet holes in the sides which need punching out, which are a bit vague in places so a bit of remedial work with a .4mm drill was required. Punching out was left until later.
Once cut into sections the floor can be narrowed. I scribed a line 1mm from the edge then set to work with tin snips;

My 'snips are Draper Expert Jewelry Snips which are well suited to this type of work.

The next job is to fold over the top lip to 90 degrees, I used a 5.5" Hold & Fold. As this is a very thin lip the fold lines were deepened with a square file until a slight witness line apeared on the opposite side to make folding easier. Then the body sides and ends can be folded, checking the ends against the sides until everything fits together with minimal gaps (some slight gaps are inevitable). Now the rivets can be punched out, to do so any earlier would risk flattening them in the Hold & Fold. Also rivetting tends to distort panels, folding strengthens the sides helping keep them flat.

Then with the body upside down on my surface table held together with Blu-Tack and tiny strips of masking tape it can be finally checked for squareness and tacked together.

More checking follows before final soldering. I work opposite corner to opposite corner to hopefully prevent any distortion and keep the heat down.

Here they are soldered together but not yet cleaned up properly, placed on the chassis;

All soldering done with my trusty 25W Antex and 188 degree solder.

Paul.