Ping!

The Y14 tender is now making progress. I've just gone "ping!" with the first 0.6mm drill that I've broken since I purchased my Proxxon drill stand. However that is nothing more than I deserve as at the time I was pushing sideways on it to use it as a mill to cut out the coupling hook slot!

All that to save me digging out the pliers to adjust my piercing saw :-/

Lesson learned, and I've now done it properly. Here's the tender top (refered to by Chris correctly as "a big b*****d piece of brass" with the coal space cut back to the correct size, and the buffer beam in progress.

 And this is the old and new buffer beams tack-soldered together to enable me to drill through the coupling hook slot. Giving rise to the "ping" moment... You can also just see at the right hand side of the right buffer hole the pilot hole for the correctly placed buffers. They're off-location by quite a bit!

And finally the old and new buffer beams separated, cleaned up, and side by side for comparison:

Now back to the soldering iron!

Flymo