Glue in transmissions??

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MPVic

Member
Joined
Dec 23, 2011
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630
Location
Hamilton, ON, Canada
Recently, I completed a beautiful Round top European on Thuya Burl with a CA finish. I haven't seen this before, but when I pressed the transmission into the lower barrel, the CA finish cracked a couple days later. The brass tube was perfectly clear, no glue at all.
I have seen many posts suggesting the use of glue to anchor the finial or the tip, but have not seen anyone suggesting gluing in a tranny.
Would greatly appreciate your help to prevent future cracking.
 
Your suggestion ..... to simply glue in the transmission ..... of itself, is not going to avoid the problem.

FIRST, you will have to REAM OUT the top end of the lower brass tube.

Once you have a sliding or loose fit for the transmission inside the brass tube, THEN you will have removed the cause of stress.

And THEN you will HAVE to glue in the transmission.

But the PROBLEM NOW IS that you don't have good control over how much to push the transmission into the brass tube.
AND how much you push in the transmission is absolutely critical to the operation of the pen.

There is more than one way to do the reaming. .
I bought a set of adjustable reamers from Busy Bee Tools.
You would have to check if there is one in the set suitable for reaming out a 7 mm brass tube.

If you have a wide variety of sizes of HSS drill bits you MIGHT find one suitable to enlarge the inside diameter of a 7 mm tube.
DO NOT DRILL OUT THE TUBE with a power drill of any kind ..... just twist the drill bit by hand !!!!!!!!!!
You will have to be very careful doing the reaming in this way and it will require considerable patience and time.

Instead of reaming out the brass tube, you could sand down the outside diameter of the transmission.
It's pretty tricky to do this ..... partly because the outside of the transmission consists of two different metals, brass and steel.

WHEN YOU DO GLUE IN THE TRANSMISSION BE VERY CAREFUL TO NOT GET GLUE IN A PLACE THAT PREVENTS THE TRANSMISSION FROM TURNING ..... There is a very high risk of doing that.
 
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