[David Dunlop]

One of the nice things about a project this size is that there is always things you can accomplish when work stalls somewhere else.

That is the current case with the component replacement work I ws doing with the Sender. It is going to take a while to source all the required resistors and capacitors I need to hopefully solve the majority of issues around valves V1J and V5D and all the bits need to be replaced at the same time. So I have returned all the valves to the Sender and the Sender to the Carriers No. 4 until such time as I have all the needed resistors and capacitors on hand.

There is a trick to getting the three main components back into the Carriers No. 4 easily. If you do not keep the chassis you are putting back completely square to all side of the Carriers No. 4 as the sockets on the chassis engage the plugs at the back of the Carriers No. 4, they will bind up and it is a royal pain in the butt to get them apart. The Sender slid in so smoothly this time, I almost thought something had gone horribly wrong.

So the part of the project I moved over to was a little painting detail on the hammer that is part of the tool kit for the Wireless Set No. 52. The original hammer was a ‘BULLDOG’ product, from what I can make out on the decal in the first photo today. A pair of tool companies show up in researching this name, one in England and the other in the United States. A few old photos of corporate logos show up, but none so far of that elongated diamond decal in the illustration. The hammer I found for the tool kit is not made by Bulldog and the handle length is about one inch shorter than the original tool specifications, but on the plus side, the handle is the correct shape, clear varnished hickory and the head is the correct weight and style; the second attached photo. I had no idea there were so many different styles of ballpane hammer heads until this project arrived in my lap.

I may never find a good condition original hammer for this project, so decided to replicate the look of an original with what I have on hand. The most obvious feature is the black end on the handle, but the top end of that feature has a distinctive angle to it. Practice as I could, I was not able to get that good a look with any kind of tape rapped around the handle. You are trying to keep a straight line around an oval cross section that is narrower at the top than the bottom of the angle. After months of ruminating over this, I finally had my ‘Eureka Moment’. If the end of the handle was dipped into paint at the correct angle, to the correct point on the handle, mission accomplished. But how does one keep the handle perfectly steady? A few days of thinking about that …and then I realized, you fix the handle and move the paint can.

I did have a one quart can of gloss black enamel on hand that would work, so that was a start. The next step was to get reference points onto the front and back faces of the handle to pinpoint the two ends of the upper angled paint line. I was able to scale these two measurements off the illustration and proportion them, with some basic High School Math, to the shorter handle I was working with and transferred these two reference points to my handle; the third and fourth pictures.

So far, so good.


David