Although the next logical step would have been to fit the brake shoes, I didn’t do that. I moved onto the cross beams instead.

As supplied, they are flat castings tapering from the middle with pins asct in at either end. They also had a hole in the middle. While nice castings they are a bit generic and some time ago a fellow member of Western Thunder sent me some 3D printed brake shoes and some thick washers to beef up the centres of the beams along with instructions on how he had created his linkages.

I started by cutting off a strip of 0.7mm nickel and then I drilled a series of holes in the strip to create the holes for each clevis to attach and to mark the beginning and end of a slot. Then I used a 1mm mill drill that I had previously bought from Amazon and pecked away at the slot until I joined up the holes.

Once separated and the ends rounded over, I was left with these.

The plan being that these too would be split in two giving me a pair of linkages for each side of the beam.

Although in theory I had one extra as ever one pair of them pinged off into the ether as I was soldering them together but I got there in the end.

Finally, I added the clevises which were provided in the kit.