I seem to have been really busy with real life and not a huge amount to show for the work on the Princess.
I have returned to the chassis while I await castings for the back head and the firebox print – Royal Fail seem to be keeping their reputation intact FB posted a week last Saturday and replacement castings from Ragstone posted a week yesterday, no sign of either yet.

On the rear axle which is to be driven there isn’t a great deal of room on the axle for the gearbox, hornblocks and taper pin. It turned out that after trying everything the taper pin actually sat under the left hand hornblock. Initially I tried cutting down the taper pin so that it just went through the axle and would spin inside the horn block. I obviously didn’t make it a tight enough fit as it went walk about. Thankfully I do have a few spare taper pin so I was able to replace it but I didn’t want the same thing to happen again so after some thought I hit upon the idea to thin down that hornblock. I took it out and milled 1mm off the rear of it. Which you should be able to see from comparing the first two photos

Next I moved onto fitting the representation of the inside motion. I had to solder the eccentric straps together and then make some location points for the slide bars and lotion plate.

I have done this with a couple of strips of scrap etch and the plan is to mill a couple of small angle plates to allow the cylinder front to be screwed in place. I will take some more detailed phots once I have finished this.

Subject to retaining it I have achieved what I set out to, you can see the cross heads through the openings in the frames, with a small amount of visible movement when the axle is rotated.