Roger usually only enters locos at Guildford that he has built from scratch. This kit built loco, was entered to demonstrate difficulties with the construction, and some of the alterations he made.

Roger explains: “I started on the tender first and this went together reasonably well until it came to the parts concerned with the meths fuel control. The control valve was assembled and soldered in place along with the silver soldering of the rest of the tank, and as soon as I screwed in the valve spindle I could see that not in a million years was it going to work. With the valve housing now silver soldered within the fuel tank I had to set about converting it to a conventional needle valve. It now works fine.”

While building the loco the first big problem was getting the valve events equal through the small fixing/sighting hole in the steam chest. It was impossible to see the centre of the valve travel so Roger ended up
disassembling the valve chest and withdrawing the valves, and scribing a centre line on the cut out in the valves, taking care not to scribe any sealing surface. This allowed him to just see the scribe line through the spy hole.

“The parts supplied for the fully reversible valve gear proved to be less than adequate with what seemed to me to be a lot of lost motion, and did not seem to have enough movement to work the valves under air pressure, so I decided to have a go at building my own to their design, and although it did seem to be better I was not satisfied, and there was no defined mid gear point to start off from when trying to time up the valves (the discarded valve gear was displayed) so in the end I opted for slip eccentric valve gear and a new crank axle was fitted and once re-timed it ran perfectly on air.

“The next problem was when I tried to get the axle pump to work. The ram came with a groove ready for an O-ring but no O-ring was supplied. Instead there was just a twist of PTFE tape that sat inside the groove, not even projecting above the top of the groove, and the ram was some 0.15mm smaller than the bore.”