Dave’s Expert Tips

Hot tip!

It might seem a bit agricultural to use a blowtorch for soldering a model railway kit, but Dave proves that a small butane gas one can be an effective tool since it provides a good blast of heat exactly when you need it. It can even be useful, with care, when soldering whitemetal. Dave uses a Nimrod blowtorch and you can buy one for less than £45 at http://tinyurl.com/y8pan2m5

Heat build-up

“Think through the heat dissipation before you start - plan what’s going to move if you add heat and what’s not going to move. The more metal you add to a kit as you build makes a difference too. All the time you’re heating a kit, the heat is dissipating. It’s travelling along the brass and it’s travelling up the casting - everything is working against you!”

Soldering overlays

Some kits require you to assemble layers of brass, called overlays. Unsurprisingly, Dave has a simple technique for this: “Tin the pieces, clamp them together, heat it with a blowtorch solder appear round the edges. You know it’s laminated and there’s no way in a million years that they’ll come apart. “Even if you have to add whitemetal castings to the overlay, there’s not going to be enough heat and you won’t dislodge this underneath.”

Keep it neat

and then until you can see the silver of the It might sound a simple thing, but make sure that your work area is tidy. Ensuring all your tools are easily accessible and that your iron isn’t going to get tangled with other equipment will make kit-building a much more pleasant exercise.