Ian Allen, fellow Guild member and font of knowledge for all things LMS kindly pointed out that the cladding band on the firebox only had the bottom four or five fixings, so the rest need filing off the firebox casting. He posted a photo showing his example and wile looking at it it reminded me that I still needed to do something with the washout plugs. I knew that I needed to do them but seemed to keep overlooking them as I progressed with detailing. So yesterday I got stuck in and made some.

My initial attempts were with a collet block but they came out asymmetrical and I couldn’t understand why so I fitted the spin indexer to the mill and tried again. it was at the point that I realised that my bit of brass rod was bent – this particular piece of rod has caught me out before…

I checked stock and found a piece of similar sized (3mm) nickel rod and tried again. All was well so I got stuck in and set up a mini production run and a couple of hours later I had enough for this loco plus a few spares.

They are designed to be soldered in from the inside. So the next job is to drill out all the holes and fit them before starting to fit all the oilboxes.