Bringing things together

Hooray ! - I'm bringing the parts together now.

The cabs are back on the locomotives now. To do this the screws in the side of the firebox have to be removed. Then the cab goes back on and the screws put back in. Which would be fine if it wasn't that the screw holes are hidden behind the cab sides. Loads of fiddling and poking followed to try and do these up. Leaving them off occurred to me but this leaves the cab flopping up and down.

Next the footboards are made up and attached. Each of these are laminated from two parts. On the earlier models I used superglue for this but while it work fine, getting accurate alignment is difficult as the glue sets too quickly. This time I ran solder around the edges. At least I can heat it up and re-do the join. A final touch is to drill holes for the sand pipes - 18mm from the back end and 5mm from the side. More pin-vice inflicted blisters for me !