A busy weekend of soldering has resulted in the bulk of the tender being put together. At this point I've found that the etchings for the tender in the PDK kit are a little rough. The half etching in particular is only about 1/4 of the way through the metal making the parts hard to cut from the waste, even harder to bend at right-angles and pretty useless where you have half etched detail. The sides shown in the previous entry had some .45mm wire soldered on as beading and then filed to a flat rather than trying to add the supposedly half etch sections which you were meant to try and curve to the radius of the flare and then solder in place (somehow!). Anyway the three sides soldered together nicely and gave a pretty decent fit at the rear joins with only a small fillet of solder needed to join up the flares. I was particularly pleased with the bottom edge joint along the tender base.

One of the sides has a tiny pin hole in it which I think I'll have to fill with solder and file down. The fit of the tender front was a little suspect and I had to use some scrap etch to get the parts to align properly, keeping the tender sides square and not leaving any gaps around the coal door. The worse excesses of solder will be hidden by coal anyway. Do I model it full of coal leaving Town for a trip into Cambridgeshire or have it half empty as it travels south? Now has any one build removable coal from a tender and swapped it in the fiddleyard before?

Springing on the tender is a particularly rough attempt as a springy beam. The problem being that there is simply no space at the end of the chassis to get much spring on the outside axles. Still it runs over by point work and has about .75mm of movement on each axle.

Put together with the loco it really comes together, the ride height is about right (or will be when I've fitted a bit of lead to the loco.

The target is to get the loco running for a little event in a couple of weeks time....

On Saturday 16th July a small group of friends will be holding a day of railway modelling at the St Mary's Church Community Hall in Sawston just south of Cambridge. We are specifically not billing this as a 'model railway exhibition', just a chance to come along and see several layouts, see what we are working on, talk about model railways and possibly raise a bit of money for the church restoration fund.

The layouts due to appear are:-

Obberkaer - P87 Danish

Pampisford - P4 BR-E (first public outing for nearly 10 years)

Oxenbridge - P4 BR-M

Fen End Pit - 16mm narrow gauge by yours truly.

We will also have some demonstrations and other static exhibits ranging from 2mm finescale to French Gauge 3!

As I said, it isn't an exhibition so we don't have any traders but teas and coffees will be available. Entry will be £1.50 for adults or £2.00 for adults with accompanying children. We shall be open from 10:30 to 16:00.

If you are in the area it would be good to see you.

David