The challenge was to take the standard issue bayonette and chrome plate it. The purpose of a chrome bayonette is to fancy up the funeral party for the re-patriation ceremony for our fallen soldiers. This seemed like a job I could respect! The ones they had been using up until now were from the old Belgian "Fabrique National Canadian Model One", the famous FNC1 which had been in use for most of the last half of the 20th century...but enough people were wondering why the funeral party wasn't using the modern bayonette...after all, they were using the modern sidearm! Well, the answer is simple. Plastic scabbard. Plastic handles. Impossible to plate!
Or is it? There seem to be a LOT of chrome plated plastic out there...my motorcycle seems covered with it. Well, it seems there are plastics which can be plated and plastics which cannot be plated. Nobody was sure if the C7 bayonette plastic bits were actually of a type which could be plated, and nobody cared for an order under a thousand units! So, I jumped up and said...hell yes! I can make a scabbard out of brass which will be impossible to distinguish from the plastic one. No really! I can do that! And I can cast the handles out of pewter, and plate those too!
Imagine my surprise when they took me up on it. So, I made them. I figure I am making less than a buck an hour on this job, but hey....its worth the effort! For these guys, I wish I could do more!
First step was get the brass. Cut it out, and roll the edges up and around a metal blank. Then roll the half scabbard in the english wheel in order to flatten it. Then make the button for the "frog"...a little cylinder of leather with a slot in it which holds the bayonette onto the uniform belt.
The tricky job was to solder the brass halves together. I use a solder which is about 30% silver, and 60% tin, with some other metals mixed in to lower the melting point. The picture shows the bayonette after I had polished and nickeled it (on the right), and the progression from left to right of the soldering.
This took me about 26 hours. Per scabbard. Counting the half dozen that failed and ended up on the scap heap!
Tomorrow, I'll take pictures of the bayonette itself. All polished up...looks fantastic!
2 comments:
Wow, what a job! What a great thing to do for your fallen countrymen.
You are a good man.
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