4. The Shay
I then turned my attention to the Shay, beginning with what I knew would be the most challenging part: the crankshaft. It took seven tries to make one.
This tedious process began with a punch I made from two sharpened steel rods soldered together. I used this to make dimples in sheet nickel; then I drilled the hole pairs. Using a jeweler's saw, I roughly cut out the webs around the pairs of holes, then carefully ground the six parts to shape. Using sheet nickel as a spacer, I made a sandwich of two web parts, which were aligned using two steel wires. I soldered the lower wire (the crankpin) in place, then soldered the three cranks onto the main journal. After cutting off the excess web material, I sliced out the journal from between the webs of each crank with a Dremel.
If I was lucky, the finished product was a good match for the real deal. However, invariably something would snap apart along the way, and there was no way of re-soldering the broken joint without ruining the rest of the assembly.
It would be impossible for me to resume this project today, as I no longer possess the ability to make such tiny, intricate parts. Even back then I was working at the very limit of my skills, and when I began to realize that it might take several years to complete the layout, I abandoned the project.
