Gale Force Armoury: Cottage Part 4: Slots

Last time I talked about tabs -- now it's time to look at the matching slots. The first style I did was identical to that shown on the venerable Legio XX page - cut an "I" shape with a chisel and then fold everything in. Two of them are shown above -- the warping is from cutting on a soft backstop. Also in this pic, topmost - a hook which broke while I was bending it. Remember, you can only move it so much without annealing!

Anyways, time to install a slot!

First things first - we need to make a slot in the steel before we insert the brass. To do this I used a long screwdriver bit - a Robertson. (Some of you more sheltered Americans might know it as "that square one".) Note: The tip of these is often slightly rounded, which makes for a bad chisel. I ground mine flat to get a nice edge on it.

I went to Canadian tire and bought an massive (120pc) set of these power screwdrivers bits in various shapes and sizes for only $20. I don't think you will find a cheaper source of repousse bits and punches precut to a variety of shapes and sizes. A tiny bit of grinding or rounding and you're ready to go, with a pre-tempered bit!

A few punches later and we have a nice, rectangular slot.

Now we insert the brass piece, and fold the flaps over the back. Let me assure you, this is significantly harder than it sounds if you are making a thin slot!

However, the problem that I ran into was that the flaps would sometimes fold slightly crooked -- but since this wasn't visible from the inside, I didn't discover the problem until too late. This left me with a foolishly crooked slot in some places.

Given how difficult it was to get the flaps folded over properly in the first place, this was rather disheartening. In retrospect I can see that it would have been avoidable if I had riveted the plates on first, and then folded the flaps second. For some reason I didn't think of this while I was up at the cottage, but I did decide to switch to riveting the plates instead -- and skipping the flaps.

Using the square punch as shown above, I simply punched out my slot in the next batch of brass plates. Below - cleaning up the slots with a needle file.

A batch of homemade copper rivets. I stuck some 10awg copper in the vice, peened one end, and then nipped it off. As you can see, these are really quite crude...