The end of the last thrilling episode left us with two sides, a middle partition and a floor, so onward with much more fret sawing and soldering and eventually a pair of end partitions materialised. A bout this time I also set about the seats. In what is now becoming usual practice, I made up a set of formers for the ribs, soldered them to a flat backing piece and then set about adding the slats with strip cut on the guillotine. I know this bit of kit was an extreme indulgence and was actually quite an effort to track down but it has been it’s weight in – well - Nickel Silver! I have not worked it out precisely but I do know that if I had used the commercially available strip for this I would be bankrupt by now.

The above pictures show the body coming along nicely but also one of the first seat which is both an admittedly awful photo but of a seat that I was just not happy with and which took rather too long to make.

While I considered what to do next I made a start on the curved, panelled driving ends. On the previous Cradbog test build I scribed the planks on these but now I tried something different. If you you have perhaps been following my impecunious equipment buying habits you may have noticed that about 18 months ago I acquired a small and actually quite cheap CNC milling / engraving machine. Again, if you have been following my rather intermittent posts you will also have noticed that it seems to have disappeared without trace. This is because I never managed to solve a rather significant problem with it – I can get the interesting bits to move as commanded by a CAD file but I just cannot get the spindle to rotate. I will do so using the test files that come with the machine and in manual mode, so there is nothing wrong with the machine. I have followed various online threads to solve this problem but they always loose me when out comes to re-flashing the software or something similar so have got no further – any helpful tips would be appreciated!

But anyway, it would work in manual mode using the little remote unit so I engraved the planks on the end before curving it and soldering on.

Pleased with the results and still not pleased with the seat I thought, ‘I could do that for the seat’ - so I did! The one slight problem I had with the end though was aligning the sheet to be engraved wit the axis of the machine, which was only achieved by trial and error. After stewing on this for a while and a couple of failed attempts I hit on a rather cunning plan which, unlike Baldrick’s, actually worked. I use a piece of ply clamped to the bed as a sacrificial sub bed so I just cut a shallow straight line into this which fitted an off-cut of metal nicely. All I have to do now is lay a length of double sided tape which holds the work piece to the bed then pop a piece of metal in the groove, butt the metal to be cut up against this and it is perfectly aligned. Actually, having just looked at the very helpful photos - what I actually did was atatch a piece of double sided tape to the work piece and then trimmed it - far neater! Probably sounds complicated but it is not and it works!

Next bit of cunningness came in my attempts to solder the formers onto the back plates at a more consistent right angled nature. It is Heath – Robinson who would be proud of me now but a series of magnets and a square that I am not too precious about worked perfectly. Pics might show what I did but further than that I will leave it up to you. All that was left was to repeat another three times!

I did just attach a pic of a finished seat but then realised that it was of one made before I perfected above method and not up to the required standard. There is a fair amount of trial and error going on here but also a pretty large dollop of bravery as if something is not right then it gets dumped, which is pretty painful at the time but really is the only way to go forward.