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I am sure many of you have seen the fantastic build thread that Ken Foran has posted of the prototype Steam Pumper that he made. I was highly impressed with Ken's build so I decided to have a stab at making the Model Trailways kit.
This was my first model that used white metal castings and I must say I am impressed. However there are a few things that I was not expecting, for example if you use a tap or a die on white metal it is very easy to get the tap or die clogged with the material and end up damaging the thread. Fortunately this only occurred a couple of times and it was easy to replace the damaged threaded part with steel studding.

The drawings and the instruction booklet are brilliant, in particular the PDF version of the instructions has very good photographs that can be enlarged to see really fine detail.

I started the build by polishing the steam pressure vessel and the components of the chimney stack. Fortunately I have a lathe which made the job very simple. Without one it would have been difficult to get a highly polished finish but I guess not impossible.
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