Phase 3: Installing the Feedwater heater

I went with everyones suggestion to use the heater seam instead of the dowels for attaching the heater and now it sits steadfast in its place ready to survive a nuclear strike.

Also: Sautéed turkey strips with peas, carrots and corn, whole grain basil pasta



Also also: Recent developments leave me with a lot more time for model building. So I'm gonna build myself a ship. You know, because ships don't lie. (Shakira, Shakira.)

My options here in Germany are:
- HMS Victory (copper plating, color set and cutout deck not available here, come on Model Space Germany!)
- HMS Victory Cross-Section
- Sovereign of the Seas (minus the magazines AND the modeling tips in the magazines, color set not available here, come on Model Space Germany!)
- The San Felipe (yawn...)
- The Yamato and Akagi (not really feeling it)

I'm THINKING of going for the Victory Cross-Section first, to see how I like it, I have no experience at all with this. Then going for the Sovereign, because it looks cooler. On the other hand Victorys instructions seem to be better suited towards the absolute beginner especially with half of Sovereigns modeling advice missing here with the magazine unavailable.

I'd be happy to hear your opinion.

Victory seems to be a good choice for beginners

With regards to the parts not available in Germany you could always see if someone on here would be willing to have them delivered to their UK address and then post them onto you in Germany. If you price up delivery I would be happy to help you out in that respect

Thank you Dave and Michu. Victory it is then.

I think Modelspace UK might be willing to send the parts directly again as they did with the D51 display case, but I'll keep the offer in mind. I DID find a local supplier for the Caldercraft colour set, so that's dealt with already.

That'll all have to wait until the German post office/DHL starts working again, whenever that will be.

Ordering the Cross Section now.

EDIT: And thank you, Jase

Phase 4: First driving wheel set and coupling rods

Baked turkey steak, parsley root sauce, sugar snap peas, rice



In this phase we receive the first premounted driving wheel set, two coupling rods and the corresponding bushings and rod pins.

The delivery weighs in at a whopping 170 grams.

A note on part counts: I've had a look at future deliveries and have decided to extend the category "screws" to include all kinds of "fasteners": rivets, bushings, pins, washers, screws, nuts etc. This also means the 4 brass rods we used in phase 1 are reclassified as fasteners.

I'm also counting the premounted driving wheels set as one part, even though it's pre-built up out of 5, because it's not us doing the actual work.

This brings the new totals to 18 parts, 16 fasteners and 518 grams after phase 4

Most of the rest of the week will be spent with deburring and prettyfying the coupling rods, so no updates really needed.

The pictures below show the work in progress with the lower rod having been deburred and partly sanded. Some work is still needed to make these really smooth and shiny. Then the same for the other one.

Your build is looking very neat, ccant wait to see it more built up

Looking great

Looking good

Tested this today, my freight train is now covered in a protective coating of chicken juices.

Phase 5 - Installing the spark arrester and blast pipe.

The spark arrester assembly was cemented to the lower part of the chimney and the blast pipe screwed to the smokebox. Then I tried to straighen out some minor misalignment and accidentally ripped apart the assembly. That was fun, let's not do that again.

After repairs:


With this, the assembly of JNR D51 200 is now 5 % done.

Phase 6 - The Front Deck

Rice and Chicken Skillet. More like rice and "we hid some tiny particles of chicken in there, maybe like half your thumb altogether" skillet. It's a buzzkiller when your company kitchen still believes in high carb/low everything else in tyool 2015.





With Phase 6 we get the first four parts of the front deck, namely .... wait. Wait what? Is that....? Did someone SNEEZE on the deck plates? Really?

So yeah, someone sneezed on my deck plates and it wasn't me. Luckily copper-alloys are antimicrobial and we should be good here. Nevertheless I gave the plates an extra good rub down with iso-propanol.

Weighing in at 45 grams this package brings the totals to
28 pieces, 20 fasteners and 598 grams.

Now the first step is to simply glue the two deck plates together and when I say simply I mean "This looked a lot simpler in theory".

What went wrong? For one the two deck plates are not exactly identical so if you're not careful like I wasn't you end up with parts of one deckplate not covering the other one and you putting your mitts into a nice big dollop of honey epoxy while you're frantically trying to fit the screws.

Because the screws - see, the screws don't fit. Not when both parts are flush against each other. The parts need to be like a half millimeter away from each other and only then will the screws actually screw in. I haven't had this much trouble fitting a thing into another thing since... well, let's not talk about that.

Anyways, my trusty isoprop cleaned that all up nice and quick and it was time to clamp the pieces together. Lemmme just grab those additional clamps I totally forgot at home this morning.....Doh!

So I went a bit ghetto office on this to substitute anything for proper clamps.




On the other hand I finally found a use for all these old business cards.

looking forward to seeing this coming together 👍

Rgd Martyn