Next up, assembling the slidebar and crosshead castings and motion brackets.
This really took something thinking about and was definitely a very strange decision during the kit design stage.
As per the instructions this assembly should remain attached to frames... but the cylinders are attached to the body, and so a BIG modification required. The body and frames were placed together, and the slidebar casting inserted to its correct position and soldered in place to the etched motion bracket. Then the motion bracket was unsoldered from the frames, carefully so as not to unsolder the slidebars.
Now that I had the correct positioning I could go to town with the supplied cast slidebar brackets. Only thing being that there were only 6 supplied instead of 8, and so I knocked a couple up from some old brass sprue. Nothing too taxing. To add to this, 16ba nuts were soldered to the rear of the bracket to simulate the nuts. Surprisingly the kits doesn’t cater for the detail in this area.
Afterwards, the assemblies were soldered to the body rather than the frames to aid splitting the engine and keeping that area nice and strong.
JB.