Hi Andy,
The parts were made from solid, milled, drilled, turned, filed, sanded, polished.... with the occasional amount of elbow steam.
The milling operation is shown above. You cannot solder aluminium with silver, there are methods of soldering aluminium but the melting point of some of this soldering metals is only 10-20 degrees lower than the melting point of the alu itself so this operations are always a bit tricky.
I did, however ,do some silver soldering on the exhaust tubes. I used copper tubing with some flanges that were left over from the Edwards project. Flanges were soldered before the tubes were bent. The soldered flanges were bolted to a piece of aluminium that I used for machining the center holes of the flanges.. Prior to bending I filled the tubes with lead by putting small pieces of lead in the tubes and heating them up with a torch till the lead was molten.
After that, bending was easy with an old bending jig that I had lying aound for many years.
After bending, the lead was removed by heating again.
Finally, a bit of polishing...
Jos