The loco is nearly done barring fine detail and of course painting. I've not done the handrails yet because I don't want to use the split pins supplied with the kit (I think DJH supply proper turned handrail knobs now) and I've either misplaced or run out of my Gibson ones for the time being.

I anticipate a bit of a struggle with the smoke deflectors as they don't sit terribly well on the frames at present.

Over the weekend I built the tender. As mentioned earlier, one of the castings was defective but rather than wait for DJH to either supply or not supply a replacement, I reckoned I could bodge my way around it. Luckily it was the inner casting for the bogie, so not visible once fitted. The main part of the tender all went together very nicely. I did have a bit of a struggle with the bogie sideframes, but got there in the end although I'll eventually reinforce the soldered joints with epoxy. i also anticipated some problems with electrical shorting between the bogies and the main body of the tender, but after some tweaking that all came good.

I made my own loco-tender connection, not liking DJH's arrangement. Finally, a temporary coupling was added to enable running tests, before I add the last few parts.

There are a couple of tight spots on the layout where the front bogie still occasionally touches the front of the cylinder, so I need to smear some araldite on that area to act as an insulator. Other than that, I'm very happy with the running! It's smooth, quiet and powerful, even without any extra weight in the boiler.

The DJH kit isn't the most up to date, and the chassis detailing is sparse, but other than the issue with the boiler length and the smokebox front, it all fits surprisingly well.