Engineering notes

By Tony Massau

The boiler has been painted with a coat of Rustoleom protective paint. Good progress has been made with transforming lengths of steel strip into crinoline bands to support the boiler barrel cladding.

The water tanks will soon be removed in preparation for fitting the boiler into the chassis of the loco. The opportunity will be taken to shot blast the tanks and do a decent paint job on them. Meanwhile with the tanks still in situ we have been trying to push on closer to the completion of vacuum pipework where the pipes duck and dive under the left-hand tank and then into the inside of the main frames. The carriage warming pipe does a similar convoluted journey in connection with the right-hand tank but we will engage with that later when the tanks are back on the loco after the paint job.