Ferranti 045 restoration: Part 2 - the cabinet

[Yorkie]

I don't actually think that stuff is a DIY job. I beleive that it's very special resin which has the same refractory index as glass, and I think it has to be heat cured, then polished. A crack might be one thing, but in this instance, the dial was broken into two pieces and had fallen inside the cabinet. Luckily, the crack was a clean break towards the end of the dial at a point where the dial was opaque. I placed the two pieces upside down of a flat surface and joined them together with glass glue - a bit like superglue, then I applied two-part epoxy so-called 'liquid metal' to the back of the dial and allowed that to cure before I moved it. I don't think that just glueing the two pieces together would have held for long as the glass was only about 3mm thick, so the join had little surface area, and as the dial is so long (about 15") any flexing of the cabinet or dial fixing points may well have cracked it. Really, the set is so large and the dial so long, that unless you are quite close up to it, the crack isn't noticable, so I'm quite pleased with it. All I need to do now, it to get it 250 miles south to Essex in one piece when we next visit our nephew and his family!

Dials are a real bugbear, espeically ones that have white lettering, so cant be reproduced on a conventional inkjet printer. I do admire people who have expertise in CAD and can reporduce the artwork - not simply clean up a scan, and create waterslide transfers. I can fumble around on Photoshop to tidy up scans, but that about it. I've wondered whether - if the artwork is reversed and a waterslide transfer produced and applied to the rear of a piece of glass so that the text then appears the correct way around when viewed from the front - the transfer would look ok when viwed from the front, or whether the transfer can only be applied and viewed from the front surface, in which case, it would need another piece of clear glass to protect it.

I've got a nice little Marconiphone T18DA 'companion' set, on which almost all of the white lettering has disappeared, without which, whatever else I do to the set, will utterly detract from its appearance. Shame, but there it goes.

I've managed to get one knob off the Fenman1 without breaking it - three to go! I've applied some Plus-Gas fuid to the knob shafts at the junction with the controls inside the cabinet and will try to lever them off in some way from the rear, because trying to pull them off from the front is to invite disaster The dial is intact on that set, and I want it to stay that way!