Well of sorts!.
It's been far too long since I was last here, the chaos of life has been insane! I would have written a few more of these over the last few months but my options are do it on my phone during work, wich is fine but I can't add pictures and all that kinda stuff, or do it at home, meaning haveing some time to sit down by the computer. As the band takes up at least 2 days a week finding time to sit at the computer and do this stuff becomes harder to find!
So where am I at the the moment, ... Well ...
Pug the reason I started all this is in 1 peice, but needs yet more tinkering, more steam required to the cylinders as 1, 4mm pipe just isn't enough to make it go like it should, also the bottm of the smoke box needs some attention, by enough room for ash and muck, and it clogs itself fairly quick,
The Moonraker, my 2" fowler plowing engine is done and steaming, its running well and steaming massively better now she's had the boiler done, so 18 months work really did pay off!
The 5" Maxitrak 4F I did got done, finished and looked a load better, everything worked and it went fairly well so that's something else to add to the "win colum"
The Foden, this is where work has mainly been focused, I've been working fairly hard on this one, it was stripped down to the frame and went in for a full, start from square 1 rebuild. So far I've rebuilt the frame after haveing the front perch bracket re-welded and sorted, and re-made the steering support, the frames need to be strippe and painted now I'm happy that it all goes together and does what it should. So whilst that is in its final stage, my attention turned to the machanical bit. The cylinder block and all it's fancy bits! First was to make new rings for the pistons, and machine ring grooves into the piston heads, then I re-machined all the valve face and regulator face, and machines the valves as no one had done that, they were just cast valve ports and were around 1mm a side wrong. Haveing got all that done in now looking at the crank and valve gear, most of it is scrap as far as I'm conserned, so I'm in the middle of makeing new eccentrics, new eccentric straps, new rods and all that fun!
I shall post some pictures sometime soon, as I have a phone full of them, I like to keep track of a lot of the work I do, so with luck you should see progress soon!
Pece out and all that hippy type nonsensical stuff!
