Typical of my work here's after a 2 month pause before a return to this project. In the meantime I played with drawing on a practice and doing some cutting and grinding. I wasn't real happy with it but then that's why one plays/practices. So I decided to take a different path and started to do some thinning. Starting with narrowing down the fillets. Unlike some I like a distinctive and tight flow from one socket to another. If you look carefully you can see the silver of the steel along both sides of the now skinnier brass. I did this all the war around using a couple of different sizes of rat tail bastards. Then moving to a half round bastard took down the tube surfaces outside of this new narrower fillet. It was odd to purposely under cut then even surfaces out. That's always been a big nono.



I went over everything with a medium then fine set of files before sanding a bunch. I will be trimming off the vast majority of the tubes so the obvious starches won't even be a part of the lug. I do expect that I will need to do more thinning in time. It's hard to really know what wall thickness remains or how even it is around the fillet. When I trim I'll get a better idea. I've included one of the other blanks to give a better idea to today's efforts. The untouched blank is just a sand blasted surface (with hand grime). The thinned one shows the nice contrast that Navel Jelly provides.



Here's the practice piece I've played with. Again you can see the fillet thinning and steel on it's sides at one point. I'm better with what I've done now. The other two lugs will wait for a while. I need to get back to the racks before this new project continues. Andy