21 October 2025

As this will be running in parallel with the Dalek project and is something I will pick up and put down at times then a separate blog diary is appropriate.

I have had a few problems due to a couple of parts going missing after the various movements of my property around different storage locations, but I've just received the final part, the sides of the tender, which has been a rather expensive purchase at 10 times the original magazine price, but at least I have now been able to obtain which is a fairly critical part of the finished model. Last year I sorted through the pile of magazines and put each part in the biscuit tin back with it's original magazine, and found the I was missing two key components. The die-cast chassis was an easy purchase at the time and while a premium over the mag price, it was not as expensive as the tender body wrapper. But everything is now in the kit and ready to go. A little counter intuitive perhaps, but I've now numbered each part with the magazine issue and tidied them into some semblance of order into a tidy pair of storage boxes.

This then allowed me to look at scanning all of the magazines, and as I've done previously with the large stack of Model Engineer and other mags, I stripped all the staples in order to put them through the document scanner. Nothing is easy however. While I'd assumed the mags are 'A3' pages, it turns out that they are actually a little longer than 'Ledger', which is the longest length that the document feeder will handle double sided. Fortunately the scanner will work in 'Long Page' mode, but only single sided, so it needed each magazine to be scanned twice. Once for each side. I soon worked out that I could run the pages through and as they came off the first pass, slip them back at the bottom of the pile ready for the second pass, just creating the one pdf with all the pages in. While the first 6 mags are made up of four sheets, the rest are just three, and easier to handle. In the end a stack of 25 only took a little over 30 minutes to run through. Next problem is to process the double page spreads back to individual pages using PDFArranger and I am about a third through that step. Having the electronic copies allows me a number of options and the first is to go through and mark up those areas that were subject to latter modifications, such as the back-head of the boiler and a couple of other areas where the initial assembly has to be modified later. The other advantage of working one the parts out of magazine order is that the dismantling of various parts for painting can be addressed by completing the painting prior to assembly.

Another area which is a little annoying is that many of the magazines have full page spreads with a loco picture spanning two pages. While the first magazine has this spread on the middle pages and so is a clean print, many of the others are spread across different sheets and have colour match problems between the two halves. It WOULD have been nice if those pages were printed on the middle spread, even if it meant that the construction notes continued after that spread. Processing with PDFArranger allows me to merge the two pages, but many will need fine tuning to match the two halves, although I don't think the colour differences will be modifiable.

Next step after sorting all the scans is to produce a complete tool kit listing. I've already picked up a few new tools such as a new set of tweezers, and I should have all of the specified drills, but may need a couple more holders for the smallest drill sizes. I don't think that the PCB drill will be stable enough, although I do have a suitable machine vice to go with it so we will see.