I'll deal with the crisis of conscience first.

Friday night was spent looking long and hard at the loco body trying to work out if everything was square. The trouble with a curvy footplate is you have nothing solid to gauge anything else off, I can see why some manufacturers build the curved valancing into a fold-up square etch so you can have something flat to work on. After much soul searching I've decided that while there are a couple of bits which aren't exactly perfect the chance of getting them perfect without unsoldering everything and starting again is just too much. It looks as if one side of the cab is actually <.5mm shorter than the other side probably because I had filed too much off while trying to fit it to the curve of the footplate. The other problem I have is that the cab seems to be about .5mm wider than it should be. Also there appeared to be a slight end-to-end twist on the footplate again of less than .5mm. None of this sounds too much and I managed to fix the twist in the footplate with a degree of brute force. I'm afraid I've decided I'm going to have to live with it and hope that the overall effect when painted suitable dirty black is ok. I suspect that I've just been staring too hard and I doubt any of this shows up in the pictures.

Moving on, I fitted the reverser, cab roof and detailing and also had a bundle of laughs with the beading around the cab opening and cab hand rail. I suspect it would have been a lot easier to fit the beading before making up the cab but the kit didn't mention them in the instructions and I only worked out what the etch was for too late.

The tiny little rear valancing foot steps were the complete pain I expected, two parts were provided on the etch, I'd had made 4 more by the time I had soldered them on without them pinging across the carpet.

The foot steps went on to and have the advantage that the body now sits level on the workbench.

So, can you see the dodgy levels?

David