The body has been sprayed at last. There has been a disaster with the tender however. Having applied the first lining transfers; yellow HMRS, it became obvious that they were wider than required. In trying to remove them, I have destroyed the finish on one side of the tender. It might have to be a complete paints strip and start again. I can't remember where I sourced the last plain yellow lining I used, but it was much finer. Looks like there might be a further delay in completing the engine…..

On the bright side, the profile view of the loco does look really good and all the effort of lengthening the footplate and tank has certainly paid off..

Adding the rivets to the tank took a lot longer than anticipated! There were several times when things went rather squiffy and had to be re started. The rivets on the front edge of the tank need to be re done. Getting them to follow the curve has proved to be really tricky. The carrier film didn't dissolve fully the first time properly but I couldn't see this until the model was undercoated. These rivets have been removed and will be done again.

Hopefully I will be able to correct this and get the tank and cab painted in green next weekend. The tender has had a light coat of varnish applied and is ready for lining.  Having looked at the lining required on the tank I realised that there are a lot of tricky curves around the tank filler and dome. I have purchased a bow pen from Goldenarrow models to help with this. This will be yet another new skill to acquire and I expect the lining will take a lot longer to do than on any previous model I have built. It seems a very long time since I test ran it and its going to be a nerve wracking moment when the tender and loco are finally united and the pick up wires connected. Will its still run as well as expected?

The tender has been sprayed using an Iwata Neo air brush. The paint colour was mixed using three Tamiya standard colours. Tamiya Green X-5 was the base with Dark Green XF-70 added along with a few ml of Flat blue XF-8.  These picture don't quite represent the colour as it appears under the layout lights. It is much bluer than Brunswick Green and seems to be a good match for the colour in the few pre war photos I have seen. I am going to allow this to dry thoroughly and see if I need to adjust the mix further before spraying the loco body. At the moment the intention is to use simple yellow lining without the ornate inner panels. I believe the inner panels were soon abandoned in the Colonel Stephens era.

The rivets are still clearly visible so it was worth all the effort of applying them.

This week has been a venture into new territory. I haven't used rivet transfers before, so it was a bit nerve racking when I finally got around to soaking the first strip. Given how expensive they are I was concerned about ruining them. I used Micro Sol to dissolve the carrier, this works really rapidly and some rivets did move and required a little nudge with the point of a knife to get them back into line.

So here the finished result. The red primer shows off the rivet texture to great effect. Just how much they will be visible once the loco is lined remains to be seen. But for now a really satisfying result!

A lot of time has been spent fitting the front coupling. Looks easy, but getting the height exact and making sure that it can swing freely took ages. After many attempts to fit a suitable spring mechanism I have left it unsprung for the time being. This can be modified later if necessary.