Reshaped Crystal for my 1016 project

[Serafino]

I took a stab at modifying a crystal for my 16013-based 1016 project. I wanted a vintage look without the pricing and other liabilities of a real vintage crystal, and it seemed like there is plenty of room to round the bevel on the modern style crystals.

I cobbled together a suitable mandrel to mount the (GS) crystal on my benchtop drill press. I built it up using a 3/8" diameter steel tube, a piece of 3/4" PVC plumbing pipe, and part of a 3-way PVC fitting. Packing tape unceremoniously bridges the gaps from rod to pipe and from fitting to crystal, and I also used tape on the tube to tune the runout to a manageable level. I used a small file and sheet abrasives in 600, 1500, 2000 and 6000 grits (the latter being the one piece from my Micro-mesh kit I managed to dig up...)

I'm fairly pleased with it for a first effort (it still needs a proper polish), although there are some things I would do differently:

If I do another one I will use a finer file and greater magnification and hopefully then I can preserve the sharp transition from the curved edge to the side of the crystal.

One has a choice between just rounding over the upper corner of the bevel, or carrying the rounding down a little into the lower corner. These two approaches seem like they might possibly relate to the two shapes we see among doubtful 'vintage' crystals which are apparently often found in the market.

I haven't sat down and done any serious comparisons to photos of real vintage Tropic 22s yet, but my guess is that the fatal flaw of this modification will be that the GS is not tall enough to fully capture the impact of a real vintage Tropic no matter how it is reshaped.

I gather that I am not the first in our hobby to do this modification--while researching strategies for polishing it up I ran into a reference to others having done it at some point.

Many thanks to LHOOQ for his GS to Clark comparison thread, which gave me the means to choose the GS and photos with which to work out the possibilities. Thanks also to everyone who posted photos in the Tropic 22 thread recently!

[lhooq]

Looking forward to seeing this in front of a dial. Good work!

[DeeKa]

Nice work!

Here I have an old photo of a T22 fitted loooong time ago

Dee

[Serafino]

I worked on the shape some more, I see now I still have a way to go, but here's the crystal with a dial under it FWIW:

Current shape: