Progress has finally been forthcoming on the Blanche kit! The last progress that I made before Christmas was way back in October, when the bosses were laminated onto the rods and the cranks were soldered onto the axles. The latter was an interesting exercise as to prevent the plastic wheel centres melting as rather a lot of heat was applied to the axle, the locomotive had to be about 95% submerged in water to dissipate the heat, like so:

The paper bush that can be seen is there to prevent stray solder from securing the axle to the bearing and giving me a sledge instead of a locomotive...

That, however, was it until Sunday, when I plucked up the courage to have a crack at the valve gear. First order of the day was to cut the lost wax brass crossheads from the sprue and try to tweak them into straight pieces. After this, the slidebars needed laminating together, and then had to be tweaked (and the crossheads opened out slightly) to give a free-moving piece:

Next came the rivets - although I found that they were missing from the Blanche kit (and Pete & Jen at Backwoods are very kindly sending me some replacements) I found some spares in my moribund Taliesin kit, which allowed me to solder the crosshead and connecting rod together, using the standard Backwoods method of a paper bush between the two pieces to pivot - and very well it works too! (It was one of the few things that went well on the Tal)

So, time to solder the cylinders and slidebars in place? No! As AER_2263 intimated, the front spring hangers are the wrong way round on the instructions, and as the slidebars mount into those, some de- and re-soldering was necessary luckily there was minimum effort involved, or I wouldn't have been a happy bunny! Once the springs were resoldered on the correct sides, the oversized cylinder wrappers were trimmed to size and the holes in the cylinder rear faces opened out to receive the piston and slide bar. The smokebox was temporarily secured in place and used (along with the slots in the chassis side) to locate the cylinders in the correct positions. These were then held with blu-tack and the connecting rods placed loosely over the rear crank to give me the length that the crosshead needed trimming to.

This done, the crossheads were slid onto the slidebars, which were then passed through the cylinder (there's a small slot on the inside front face that these locate into, giving the correct angle) and soldered into place on the inside of the cylinder. Luckily, the cylinders held up to the abuse as repeated cock-ups when soldering the wrappers into place had led to metal fatigue, which in turn led to the front face falling off one of them! Finally, the cylinders and slidebars were soldered into place, leaving me in this position as of last night, with the coupling rod placed over for cosmetic effect:

Onwards now, to some filing of rod bushes and soldering them into place on the cranks. The bushes provided seem to be rather short, only just passing through one of the rods and bosses rather than both, but I think they'll do the job. If not, it's a relatively simple job of de-soldering them and obtaining the correct ones. Wish me luck!

UPDATE: The bushes won't play - they're too short and cause the running gear to jam as the connecting rod is effectively acting like an eccentric. I've just asked for some bushes to be added to my request for spares!