Oil grooves in piston valves

Hi Garry

Firstly if you look at the drag beam there should be holes for the vacume pipes etc; this is shown in drawing 8

Watch out for your running boards before you assemble them there are slots for the oil lubricator, and other items. BUT not convinced this is where it should be doing more research. The steam injector pipe is at the wrong angle but not a lot we can do about this if we have purchased reeves etc; castings.

Other comments;

The cut outs in the main frames for the boiler blow downs need to be about 1/2" further up and about 1/8" further forward. The reamed 3/16" hole near the front coupled wheel should be 7/32" . There are 2 different boiler drawings in circulation. The one you want has the girder stays on top of the fire box wrapper attaching to the outer shell of the boiler. Check the thread sizes of the boiler fittings agree with the thread sizes for the boiler bushes. The steam manifold is shown twice with discrepancies in the measurements

One correspondent tells me that the bogie frames are too short on the drawings. Worth checking before you cut metal.
From an email.
Someone else (sorry, I forget who it was) said the following:
The boiler is pitched .375" too high, this makes the cab height out of scale. On the full size engine there is virtually no gap between the frame and boiler. The cab and running boards are approx .75" too wide as is the tender. I have seen one built using Martins drawings but scaled correctly, a big improvement on mine. Have no fear though, it is fairly easy to build and steams and pulls like a good'n. If you have an old set of drawings you may find a stretcher trying to fit between the frames where the middle tender wheelset sits. This corrected on later drawings.

I am going to try and get mine running on air next week so everything crossed

regards

Bob