Work continues on the tender chassis and making it ready for re-wheeling. A lot of attention has been focussed on the steam brake system and in particular the manufacture of a new brake shaft to replace the unserviceable original.

The orignal shaft was used to fabricate a special purpose jig to allow us to set the relative posiiton of the various arms in the correct locations when the refurbished arms are installed on the new shaft.

The various arms which are attached to the shaft were cut-off, and each of them has now undergone an extensive amount of repair. This consists of building up the corroded areas with weld, restoring holes to the correct sizes, and re-bushing. This will ensure that everything is “in tolerance” and in as near to as new condition as we can get.

The original steam brake cylinder and piston have been retreived from storage, cleaned-up and dimensionally inspected. The restuls indicate that there is hardly any wear in eithe the cylinder or on the piston, which is is good news as it means that both can be re-used with only minor remedial work being required.

The original brake shaft intermediate bearing blocks have also been skim-machined to bring them back to true roundness, as they had worn a bit oval.

Other work on the tender chassis includes re-busing the spring hangar links and ongoing production of the numerous pins for the spring and brake gear. We have decided to make all pins and bushes from new so that all dimensions and tolerances are ‘as new’. None of this is particularly glamourous work, but it will result in the tender chassis being as high quality as we can make it, and we believe result in longevity and minimal maintenance in the long run.

That’s about it for this update. Hopefully there will be some more new soon on the manufacture of the new tender brake shaft and setting up of the hornguides on the tender.