I wasn't actually expecting to get started on this today but the Great British weather cut short our weekend camping trip (and the music at the festival was awful - beer good though!), so came back last night and had a pretty full day of it.

Job one was making up the horn blocks. Instructions said to fix the cage with epoxy so it wouldn't come undone on soldering to frame and to save solder getting in the works. I knew better of course and thought if I used 188 degree to solder the cage and 145 to fix to chassis I would be fine. Well it soldered OK but of course it crept in to the inner bearing surface which resulted in much filing, scraping and bad language until the bearings would slide properly.

Next job was to cut up the perfectly good coupling rods so they could be articulated in two halves . Pretty straight forward but am a bit concerned that the will be strong enough in the middle where they join as now only a single thickness.

Third job was to cut out the slots for the horn blocks. I flooded the half etched lines with engineers blue to make them clearer and then went to work with a jewelers fret saw and a very fine blade. I struggled for ages with this saws and was always breaking blades but eventually spotted my mistake. I saw a chap making ear rings at a craft fair and he had his blade really loose. I had always made my blade really taught and on slackening off I hardly ever break blades now.

Folding up the chassis was easy and by lunchtime I was here;

After lunch I started to make up the gearbox. I t was the first time I had used these Branchlines Multiboxes and it was not a nice experience. This largely came down to the shaft for the idler gear being an impossibly tight fit on the gear despite rounding of the edges as per instructions. This lead to bending of the etched frames as I tried to push it in. Eventually got it sorted but not entirely happy with the running and may well end up replacing it.

In my little improvised jig and ready to solder hoer blocks in.

At this stage I found that my best laid plans did not work as the gearbox would not fit due to the rear frame spacer. Not a fault of the kit but of me driving the rear axle instead of the front. Still it didn't take long to get the fret saw out and slice down the frame then bend the resulting tab back and re-solder at an angle to make a pretty little triangular strengthening box at the rear of the frames.

After running the motor and gearbox on the bench for a bit I set about fitting the wheels. One advantage of the horn blocks is that I can set the wheels on the axle and quarter them first and then drop them into the guides. It would help to fit spacing washer first though!

Next went the coupling rods and I soon found that these needed packing out a bit as the ends of the axles are slightly proud of the wheels even after correct gauging. This has resulted in the crank pins being a bit short so best solution will be to bit the bullet, dismantle and turn a bit off the axles in the lathe, The crank pin is still going to be a bit short on the front axle though as it has to accommodate the connecting as well so think I will have to fit a longer 14ba bold - is just a pity that I have thread locked already.

It is almost pushing along but is too late for fiddling now (and there was some wine involved earlier!), so pretty pleased with day one really.