Saturday, August 12, 2017

Shoulder Buttons

In this post I will show how I made the shoulder buttons. Like a lot of these detail parts you can buy resin or aluminum versions of these online, but one of my design goals was to build as much as I can from scratch.

R2_Shoulder

I started by cutting a dowel into pieces the correct thickness. I then used a centering tool (see my last post) to find the center of the dowel. Normally I wouldn’t worry about the angle between the two lines but in this case I also need them to locate the small holes at the edge so I made sure they were 90 degrees to each other. Finally I marked the centers of the edge holes.

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I put the dowel in my clamping jig (again see my last post) and drilled the two edge holes.

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I also drilled a larger hole which I will need for the raised button in the center.

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For the button I used a premade wood plug. These were pretty close to what was needed but the actual buttons are a little more cone shaped and these are a more domed.

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To fix this I drilled a small hole in the center of the button and attached it to the end of a dowel with a nail. I then used my small bench belt sander to refine the profile.

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Here is it looked like before (on the right) and after (on the left).

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Here is the button glued into the base part.

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Once the glue was dry I drilled the center hole. Here is the final product with a couple coats of grey primer on it.

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