This morning I was getting ready to fit the sides when I double checked the bends against the sides of the inner cage and realised that I had my bends a little too low on the side so the tender side would sit flush without having to force it into place. Past experience has taught me that while you can force items into place and then solder them the odds that the solder under tension will give at some point in the future so I elected to do something about it before soldering the sides on.

Bending kit etches has become a bit topical over on Western Thunder so I thought I would go into a bit more detail about how this came about and what I did to get around it.

As supplied the Just Like The Real Thing Stanier Tender kit that I am using had riveted sides which came with some little etched tabs to guide you where to make the top fold.

You can see the small tabs with the red lines against them in the image below.

By laying one JLRT side over the replacement MOK welded side I transferred the bend lines over. Unfortunately these lines create a guide rather than a specific place to bend and I had got it wrong. Now being half etched and nickel getting the bend to move was going to prove a little tricky. However I reasoned, that worst case scenario I could use the flat JLRT sides as a template to cut out some replacements from 10 thou nickel sheet if I made a mess of things.

The first thing that I did was to ease the fold line that was too low. I did this by carefully beating it with a rubber mallet, using a thick steel tube filled with lead as a makeshift anvil.

Note that I was using a curved surface rather than a flat one. The idea being to ease the bend back into a shallow curve rather than trying to flatten it completely and risk leaving a crease.

Next I measured the tender side to see where the start of the bend should actually be rather than working to a guestimate between the two previously marked lines.

On one side it was 4.5mm at each end and the second side it was 4.5mm at one end and 5mm at the other I transferred these marks to the outside of the MOK tender sides so that I could drop them in my folding bars and still see the line as I positioned it ready for rebending.

You can just make out the middle line in the image below.

Then finally I bent it in the right place.