It's sometimes easy to look upon a tender as being an afterthought, and I seem to have only built one other loco with a tender recently. I think I fell down that rabbit hole. The tender is going to take a bit more time than I would have liked, but at least the etches are very good for this build, no mistakes so far except for ones of my own making. This brings me on to the castings for this project, most of which have been produced by Mike Hopkins at Scale-Factor and look very good.
I noticed that the real tenders have an inner chassis rail running from end to end just behind the wheels, with the well of the water tank sitting just inside. Adrian Rowland at Northstar design, who produced the CAD for the etches, extended the inner chassis etch down a little to incorporate the sides of the water tank that are visible through the lightening holes in the tender chassis frames. I thought building a little extra detail between the frames, such as the water tank, would be a good way of disguising the 'O gauge' tender inner chassis and showcasing Mike's castings at the same time.
First Mike pointed out that the drag beam I had made was wrong, and should be much shorter with a wooden plank between two plates. I built this, using a plastikard beam (at the request of the painter,) and shortened the inner chassis to suit. I also made a more detailled drag box using a left over 3D printed tender spring from a previous job that just happened to fit.
I closed the water tank and made the vacuum reservoir/tank that is attached to the bottom of the water tank well. There were no etchings for the brake hangers, but there are parts for the pull rods. I made the hangers and got Mick Davies to print brake blocks.
I'll complete the chassis and tender underframe when Mike's castings arrive.
I moved on to build the tender body and the tender front.
Not all of the tenders have the tool cabinet on the tender front so there are no etches for it. It is, however, quite an easy thing to scratchbuild. The flares are always quite tricky to form. There were thin, half etched, strips for the flares provided in the panel of etches. They were curved by laying them on a strip of old conveyor belting, placing a rod of the appropriate diameter on top and jumping on it. Attaching them to the tender in the correct orientation and height is tricky. I made a little jig so I could position the strips accurately on the tender sides. The last job was to make a tender top. I didn't bother making the coal space the correct shape, as the brief is to fill the tender with coal.
More next week when the castings arrive from Mike. I seem to have Paul O'Grady and Lucy Mangan watching my every move.
That's why I have a notice hanging in the workshop which reads... "God put me on this earth to finish a certain number of projects and right now I'm so far behind I will never die". 
) I'm afraid to say, I'm inundated with work right now (some much so I've had to close the shop door for a good 12-18 months) so had to sadly pass on this project, save the few bits here and there Nick needs as pure 3D prints.
