Turret Tender Update

Our turret tender design work is now complete. We have approved all the etch work, brass castings and instructions have been written. We have now ordered all the castings from John Dersch and have commenced production of the etched sheets through Master Cut. All the components are also on order and we should have them available in the next month or so.
Our first run will consist of 60 tenders. We have still to finalise an exact price but they should be somewhere around $120 per tender kit.

Below are some photos of the completed tender prior to painting. In the last lot of revisions we added a few more details on the front bulkhead of the tender body....Valves, steps etc. The issue of the over etched rivets have also been resolved.....it seems that we simply had the rivets too small......our last sample revealed the same....... hence yet another delay. We also solved an issue that arose with the footplate height. When the tender was married up to a DJH 53 the fall plate on the loco sat 2mm too high. It was initially assumed that we had made a mistake with our measuring however further checking of measurements found that in actual fact the DJH locos (50, 53 and 55 classes) all have their footplates 2mm to high. Probably to compensate for the over size wheels and over scale footplate. We were also able to borrow several brass models and marry our tender to them.....Perfect height. So, we have made the footplate of the tender adjustable so it can be built to suit either the correct height for brass models or the higher height for the DJH kits.

The bottom 2 photos show the tender married to an almost complete DJH 53 Class. You may also see that I have drilled the rear markers 0.5mm for fibre optics to replicate working markers. These were drilled after they were soldered to the tender body.