Well, what an absolute beggar making those turned out to be.

I have made at least eight or more of these plates before getting the bolt heads in the right place and mounted to the sleeve correctly. Quite embarrassingly, it was for the most part due to my failure to add up correctly when working out the degrees of spacing around the circumference…

Still I got there in the end.

Removing the cast sleeve was a bit of a challenge and I used a combination of a piercing saw, a wood chisel and old files dipped in talc. This did remove the sleeve but it was hard work and left the stub slightly oversized and not remotely round.

I decided to make a tool to cut the stub into a regular round shape. I started with a length of steel round bar which I had recovered from an old printer fuser unit that I had replaced. I salvaged all the useful parts which included the bar, several springs and a number of screws. I am not sure what type of steel it is but it’s probably the most free machining steel that have used to date.

I cut off a short length and faced off the end. Then I drilled a 3.2mm hole in the end. Once drilled I then took it over to the mill where I secured the length of bar in a square collet block. Finally using a bit of trial and error I cut teeth into the rim. The series of photos below show some of the milling process. I had already took a small cut to establish where the teeth would be before thinking to take photos.

The opposite end of the rod had a stub turned on it (which it located in the printer). This allowed it to be gripped with ease in a pin vice.

It made remarkably short work of truing up the misshapen end of the casting.

The next job is to test fit them to the footplate and see if I have resolved the problem.

Plan A is to recreate the flanged sleeve as a separate entity which will sip over the end of the main steam pipe and allow movement to hopefully take up the gap.

I started by fly cutting both ends of a piece of nickel bar to the radius of the smokebox.

Then, I turned down the diameter and drilled out the centres before parting them off.

The backing disks were turned from small squares of 0.2mm thick scrap etch.

The disks were turned, by super gluing the square offcuts to an arbor made from the remains of the nickel bar that the sleeves were turned from. I could have used solder to stick them to the arbor but reasoned that superglue would be easier to get off the finished disks and so it proved.

The next job is to remove the cast sleeves from the end of the steam pipe castings.

The Princess continues to challenge.

The replacement for the live steam injector pipe took much tweaking and test fitting before it fit snugly with the chassis in place.

Once I got my head around how the pipes ran, the two front oilers didn’t present too much of an issue although I had to look at a good number of photos before I worked out where said pipes ran.

Next I removed the pin rom the bottom of the steam pipe castings and drilled and tapped them 10 BA so that I could screw them to the footplate through the mounting holes

As can be seen from the snips below there is quite a gap between the boiler and the steampipe flange. At the moment I am not sure where the problem lies, whether it’s in the placement of the mounting holes, in the dimensions of the castings or something else. Initially I tried turning down some washers to fill the gap but I don’t think that’s the answer.

Despite having a few things going on in the real world this week, I have made some steady progress on the body details.

While I had the boiler in place I fitted the front pipe clips for the vacuum ejector pipe.

Then I fitted the pipes for the top feed which took quite a bit of filing to get them to sit snugly on top of the splasher without the boiler rocking.

Then having removed the boiler I drilled a hole in the bottom of the elbow fitting for a small pipe which is visible on most photos no matter what period.

That done, I moved onto fitting the twin oil boxes and their frames. This area still needs much cleaning done.

Then it was the front vacuum pipe and associated pipework which was included as nice castings in the kit. I did make the bracket to hang it from the rear of the buffer plank after adding a pipe union from brass tube.

Finally for this update I chose what I viewed as the easier set of pipework to add first. Not before I replaced the etched mounting brackets with some from flat bar after peering at photos and noticing that they were plates with two holes in them rather than straps wrapped around the pipework.

Now to work out how to fit the injector pipe on the other side.