I ended the first part of this project by mentioning I needed some bits from Scaleforum.  One of these was the injector which I modified a little from an Alan Gibson one. I also needed some firebox wash out plugs. Again Alan Gibson did the honours. It’s worth noting that they are not on the same places either side.   The cab roof was just a bit of nickel silver rolled to the right radius and a few bits of strip for the rainstrips. The vent was filed up from Evergreen section.  While on the subject of the cab the kit includes some bits and an etched floor. I found the handbrake column, if mounted to the cab floor as the kit was designed, gets in the way when trying to mate the body and chassis together so I cut it from the floor and mounted it to the body instead. The kit specifies that the reversing screw is mounted on the left side of the cab but, while hard to see in photos, it seems to be mounted to the right side so thats what I did.

With everything in place and being happy wit the fit of things the body was given another light undercoat before the missing rivets were added from my dwindling supply of Archers along with some from Railtec.  Thankfully the flatirons dot have a lot of visible rivets.

I don’t normally take a painted but pre-weathered picture but this time I made an exception.  I mentioned in the last post that because of the carzatti front axle the coupling rods seemed backwards to the norm with the joint ahead of the middle axle not behind it. When No.2000 was modified this remained the case.  The kit has the coupling rods the normal way round with the joint behind the middle axle and I’ve never seen a model flatiron (in either 4mm scale of 7mm scale) that addresses this. I found 52f models do a set that have the right wheelbase with the joint in the right place so I used those instead.  One little tip that seems really obvious but I’ve never seen anyone mention (perhaps its because it is obvious to everyone else?) is that I line up the coupling rod on this side with the orientation of the grub screw on the final drive gear.  It makes accessing the grub screw simple should you need to in the future as you know where to stop the wheels rotation.

Below some pictures of the finished loco with my usual caveat of still needing coal and a crew. With her baby sister!