Although I haven’t posted for a while, the battle with the 4000 gallon tender has continued.

The biggest issue has been the coal space and getting it to fit. The instructions rather unhelpfully refer to fettling and filling gaps with coal. Fine if you are modelling a tender loaded with coal but not if you want to see the coal pusher.

The coal pusher castings are Finney 7 and as expected just come as a set of castings so I needed to make the push rods from strips of nickel cut with the guillotine.

Although a casting was provided in the set for the vent pipe arrangement Due to the laminated rear of the coal space being quite a chunk I didn’t trust that I could successfully solder it on without the risk of melting it so I filed up a replacement from some brass bar.

In order to get the coal chute to sit down properly I had to cut 2mm of the front edge.