Mostly my time has been decided between work and the band, there has been a lot of practice to get up to a level where we can go out and gig, and as we have a gig coming up we have been on the case somewhat solidly over the last few weeks,
Apart from that I've succumbed to some random cold/flu thing (thanks james!) which is really bugging me!! it hasn't stopped me yet but I have this nasty feeling its going to hit me like a truck later on, but until then ill keep on doing what I do!
The Foden had a trip out on Sunday, up to Swindon for. Steam and chips, and it's now 100% officially sorted, I have both boiler certificates, steam and hydraulic, with Minimal fuss ( apart from a crafty re-machining of the safety valves a few days before!)
so after all the hard work and tests I was a day of steaming involving a road run to the pub......or 2!!!!
A few things have popped up as issues to sort, number 1... I desperately need to put a surround over the water gauge, having just put a new one in ( having managed to hit the old one with an Allen key or something whilst trying to sort a different issue,) I broke the new one too trying to put a cup down inside the cab.... Fail!!!!
Second on the list is the pump. Although I am fairly happy it "works" but it's not enough you can't fill the boiler with it, it's more of a .... "It stops the water level dropping quite as fast" kinda thing so there will be some work to be done to get a bit more flow going through that!
The third major thing is the blast pipe / fire grate, the grate we recon has too many bars in it, so not enough room for air to get up and through, also the blast pipe we recon is too big so it's not really barking hard enough to draw the fire that well, you can sturr it up and it steams well but you need to get in there poke it around and sturr it up fairly hard before it will go properly! So some work to be done there!
As a side project with it all is the lights! I'm keen on having proper lights on this beast and not being much of an electronics type person, ( all I know about electric is its all black magic and witchery!!!) ill need to learn a few things so the plan is to have the lights set up to a switch and a battery, easy, head light/ tail lights, cab lights and canopy lights ( just for fun).. I'm also gunna run a dynamo from the crank to help keep the battery charged so I went and got this 
Wind up led torch! This will from the basics of my system, I have a battery (Be it small for what I want ), some lights which I can ignore and wire in my own lights for other things, and most important is the dynamo, first thing is to strip the guts out of this and mount the dynamo on the engine and run a belt off
The crank, throw a fire at the engine and see what kinda of output power I get I guess!
If any electrical wizards out there read this and fancy getting in touch with some helpful advice, please do! I'm a little out of my depth with this electronics stuff!
Rock n'roll and all that jazz! ... Or funk. Which ever floats your boat!!!
Laters!
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