So where to start?, well I thought I'd start with an easy item, the bogie truck, did I say easy??? I had read Don's "words and music" completely a number

This is a big update, this will be where I leave the tender for now until the final painting session once the loco is ready for the same. There's a

This update is going to look a bit strange as some bits may look 'out of step' for example I begin covering the fabrication of the steps and then the

Brake cylinder support brackets, I've deviated from Don again ( making a habit of that) both in method and design. Don states to bend up the brackets from 1"x 1/

Dons 'Doncaster' has 4 cylinders , 2 each for the loco and tender. these are vacuum controlled and incorporate an auto-braking system. This again is as per prototype.  I have tried

The vacuum brake reservoir stores enough vacuum to enable the brakes to operate, the brakes on this locomotive are the auto-brake system, that is, if the locomotive becomes separated from

This was a fun thing to make, again it's fully functional and follows the same principles as the prototype. Of course it won't function exactly as full size as water

I started to follow Dons method for making the hook which basically starts off as a 4 1/2 x 1 x 3/16 flat BMS which you turn down

There are in fact 32 shock absorbers on Gresley's Pacific and I guess I should have built them all at once. However on further reading about FS it's come to

In this update I'm going to describe the fabrication of the leaf springs and I'd like to start by pointing out that the thickness for the springs as given by

spring hangers.. ahh.. bless the little buggers, these take a fair bit of work resulting in soar fingers, you'll probably hear me say this a lot as the build progresses.

These are made from solid and begin life as lumps of steel cut to 3" lengths ready for machining the buffer stocks. I'm not sure what steel this was as

I have probably said a number of times so far, how impressed I am with Don's design and how accurate it is in following the prototype, the handbrake is just

Today I have details of the brake shaft construction, this one item took me two days. So much work for a relatively small yet important part of the tenders braking

Continuing with the brakes here we have the last laser cut part from Malcolm's brake hanger kit. This is the front brake beam, if you look closely you'll spot the

These are the brake hangers, they are laser cut items from Model Engineers Laser. There are 8 in total, 2 front which are the ones with the boot leg shape

Ok, so we now move onto both the spring hanger and brake hanger brackets. The brakes and suspension components will be filling these blog pages on and off for a

Although the oil trays are relatively simple things to make they do take a fair bit of work/time to complete and some bits are very small which doesn't help

The next step was to get a little paint onto the parts made to date, as far as the body was concerned this just involved primer and a little satin

Next on the list (it's a very long exhaustive list) was to do the doors for the tender, in this case the doors that connect to the cab doors when

The beading is an interesting subject, I have seen a number of ways of doing this from others. In this case I have used some of those ideas and also

Well today we have the lamp irons... Pic96 First I cut some suitable brass to length and then bent it 90' followed by a lot of filing to shape, this

I then directed my attention to the stiffeners that give internal support to the tender sides. I have deviated from Don's instructions as they seem to be just for show

I then tackled the two locker doors,which were nicely laser cut. The hinges were fabricated with strips of brass that had copper tube soldered to them ready to be