I have been struggling to have the head space for much modelling for a couple of months due to a house move – I had forgotten just how much you need to do when buying and selling houses….

This has meant that I started to make mistakes through in attention on the 06 so I decided that I needed something simple to maintain the mojo and this has taken the form of another of Connoisseur’s offerings. I collected this from Jim at Cleckheaton after enquiring about it late last year and then promptly forgetting about it until Jim reminded me a couple of weeks before the show. It is his recently released, former Majestic models NBR tender truck. – The plan is that it will run behind Nellie.

Jim’s test build highlight a few areas where you need to do a bit of filing to make later parts fit and so far I have been doing this and making up some sub assemblies.

This is the brake lever and guard as provided in the kit. I wasn’t too keen on it being cast in one piece, because apart from lacking fidelity I reasoned that it would also be quite vulnerable.

The lever guard is a Bill Bedford etch from the spares box, the lever I made from a strip of etch and the mounting was made from a piece of square bar that I cut to rough shape and finished with the Dremel.

The instructions suggest soldering the step brackets directly to the front of the sole bars and to strengthen them with .7mm wire. I chose to mount them through the base of the sole bars using the slots provided but I did strengthen them (albeit with etched strip not wire)

The outer sides are done as per the instructions.

I couldn’t resist fitting them together loosely to see how they would look when fitted.