It has been over a month since my last entry. So what has happened.

As readers of my missive will know I am concerned that the Airfix Tender seems to be a lot taller than the cab. Approximatly 1mm or a scale 3 inches. In fact the reverse should be true in that the cab should be slightly higher than the leading edge of the tender roof and about the same hieght as the little raised lip on the rear of the tender roof.

So having got myself some copies of the drawings from the NRM and done some measuring I can confirm that the Airfix/Dapol/Kitmaster BR2A tender is spot on! Height is ok.

There are a few errors, the tender is a little narrow and the fire Iron door is too narrow but is the right height. You can correct the latter by filling and cutting but you find that you are then going to thin out the coal bunker side. In my view I don't think that it is worth it. I should also remove th eraised moulding that represents the gear cover for the water pickup. But again I don't think that it is worth it.

Oh and the lip on the back of the tender roof is called the Deflector.

So if the Tender is at the correct height then this means that the cab is too low. Now I did get a drawing of the cab layout and it shows some dimensions as does the drawing on Plate 91 of Talbot. The problem is that you have to measure from rail height. Not the easiest of things and as such I had a devil of a job trying to find the fualt.

One of the things that I did notice was that the lower part of the cab, the angled bit, should meet the vertical part of the cab and at the same point as the bottom of the footplate.

The Airfix cab is a little lower, in fact it looks like a 77xxx cab.

Did the guys at Kitmaster look at the wrong locomotive?

Raising the cab up 2mm just don't right though and there is a risk that you can start to expose the hole behind the cab moulding

It is about this time that I was given a Kitmaster box containing two half built 76xxx's, along with the comment that "I started these some years ago and I don't think that I will get them going." hmmm are these two the embreos of 76010 and 76011? Then I spotted that under one of the half assembled chassis was a raising block that lifted the rear of the running plate by around 1mm. I checked my model and the other Kitmaster. Yes the footplate drops by 1mm over its length. So the fix is to put pads under the footplate.

You can see them in white plasticard. This brings the roof up level (in fact slight proud) of the tender roof. I then raised the cab by about ¹/₂mm plus and this fixes the height problem. 2nd photo shows the packing uder the side rails as well as under the boiler back and under the front of the cab.

Next job pipes and fittings onto the boiler and time to get the tender fitted out.