7.5) Item 13, Release Lever Fabrication

The release lever fabrication looks as below:-

This is made up from two 1/16" thick brass release lever plates, as below. A good way to make these is to soft solder two small pieces of brass together and then file/ drill both at the same time, so that they will be identical. I recommend that you save some time by using the CAD drawings in section 9 to print out the part 1:1 on sticky backed paper and use that as a template for your drilling and filing. When finished, heat again to melt the soft solder and separate the parts. Finally, be prepared to file a bit more off the 15.33mm radius when you assemble the sextant, as the clearances between Item 13 and Item 44 are quite tight.

One brass thumb pillar, as below:-

And one brass release lever pivot:-

The four parts are then soldered together using silver solder (item 79) in the Release Lever Fabrication, as below:-

Note that the release lever fabrication may be easier to solder up if you position the release pillar (see section 7.3) in the 5mm holes first to act as a spacer and check the fit before it's too late. However, DO NOT SOLDER THE RELEASE PILLAR TO THIS FABRICATION. My initial attempt at this assembly had me accurately machine the 5.58mm dimension as 6.30mm, making the whole assembly to wide to fit in the index arm. I then tried to re-work the existing parts, only to have my parting tool explode quite spectacularly on me. After that I took 90 minutes to re-make items 51, 52 and 53 from scratch.