Good news, I went over to Polly this morning to collect Kits 6 and 7.

I have made a start on Kit 6. The first job was to fit the cylinder drain cocks and then to attach them to the actuator bar. This involved turning the chassis upside down, this is now getting quite tricky as it is pretty heavy now.

The drain cocks needed to be fastened with threadlock. Polly don’t include these consumables in their kits but I had something suitable in stock.

I then moved onto the valve chests.

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Here I was caught out by some missing graphite yarn. I gave Lucy a call and there is some in the post now. I think that they used to pack more in the previous kit, but the lengths provided for the main pistons have all been used.

 

 

 

The valves float on the port faces of the cylinders and are held against the ports by the pressure of the steam in the steam chests. To allow them to float properly, the valve nuts need to be a slide fit in the valves. A little bit of emery cloth sorted that out nicely.

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Here you can see the loose assembly of the valves, rods and chests. I haven’t been able to screw anything in place as I need to get the graphite yarn into the valve rod packing nuts.

Finally, I did a bit of loose assembly of the intermediate valve rods. These will connect the valves to the weighshaft. The trickier bit of setting the valve timing happens in Kit 7 when I have fitted the reverser.

I hope to be back in a couple of days with more progress on this.