Not the only president causing problems.

I should have been finishing the cylinders and making piston valves, but as it's been cold in the workshop been doing some bits that don't take too much thinking about, it seems low temperatures result in brain freeze, perhaps due to my lack of cranial insulation. I ordered some 16g smokebox tube from M-Machine who obviously had run out, but someone there took the trouble to machine down a bit of thick wall tube to the correct o/d and sent me that, which I think is very good service, it ended up with a 1/8" wall thickness which gave me the idea of fitting the smokebox front using three pins and a bayonet type device, much simpler than my original plan of fitting a narrow ring at the front of the smokebox to thicken the wall, there now being a good thickness of smokebox wall to anchor the pins. Smokebox door is turned from a lump of brass bar, fitted with dummy hinges and drilled and tapped to take 12 little dummy door dogs, just waiting for some more 10 BA bolts to arrive. The chimney and petticoat pipe are made to the drawings and are a bit of a faff, I finally made a GHT design mandrel handle to screwcut the short internal thread on the petticoat pipe which made it easy to control, why didn't I do it years ago?! Some fiddly filing on the base of the chimney and the spacer washer turned on a small angle plate fixture to the inside smokebox radius. Now it's warming up my brain might function well enough to get on with the cylinders, smokebox is only rested on for the pictures which is why the chimney isn't vertical.

That's going to be a very solidly made locomotive Dave!

Keep it coming please.

Regards,

IanT

Thanks Ian

And to think I like 2 1/2" gauge because the loco's are easy to carry about! progress a little slow lately as I've been found other things to do by SWMBO, and the Covid injection made me feel quite rough for a few days. The steam pipe drillings into the PV steam chest were found to be drilled at different angles, and on one it had been drilled in the wrong place, I did think of blanking the existing holes off and re-drilling, but am wary of trying to silver solder here as there has been a lot of soft solder splashed about on the cylinders, looks like someone tried to solder plain tube in the steampipe holes.Despite thorough cleaning off and facing the casting old soft solder caused problems building up the base of the cylinders. Ended up making cardboard templates and using those to locate the steam pipe drillings through the smokebox wall which were cut with a slot drill. Steam pipes made up and small sealing spacers filed up to hopefully seal where they pass through the smokebox, for some reason this took a huge amount of time to sort out, putting one thing right puts something else out. for such a simple looking job it has been one of the most frustrating so far. I had made the smokebox door dogs to the drawing, but thought they looked a bit odd with square ends, photographs of the full size show them rounded off which looks much better, although some of the full size did have square ended dogs ,maybe made up in the sheds?.

I had to bite the bullet and round the fiddly little things off, tried filing buttons but too small, si I had to make a little fixture to go on my little GHT rotary table. The brass dog locates in a groove to hold it in place with a pin that fits through its fixing hole and is held with a small clamp. Rounded them all off ok, but it's a good job I made a few spares! I still have no control over where pictures go, but i'm sure you can work out which is which, they also show the built up chimney, the door in place and the bell in position. there's still the headlight to make and fit, but I'll leave this until a little light relief is needed from something else (pun intended!).