The Lottery Heritage Funded project on Rivetting will provide a lasting legacy as there is still much to do on the loco in this area

Other work underway is the refurbishment of the Reversing mechanism - this has been supported by grants from The Rowlands Trust and The Summerfield Charitable Trust.  We would like to express our sincere thanks to them for their support

The mechanism starts with the eccentrics which are attached to the driving axle - ours had been badly corroded by the years in storage so machining was essential.  To do this we made a dummy axle - this will be used for many other projects whenever a "Great Western" loco needs attention to its eccentrics

Once the surface has been brought back to perfect round, the eccentric straps (made as part of our earlier NLHF project) were white metalled and then machined back to a perfect match to the eccentrics

The eccentrics are connected via internal connecting rods to drop links and on to rocker arms - our rocker arms had suffered very badly over the years and needed a great deal of work to bring them back into use.  The complete housing and shaft were removed from the loco - the shafts were far from round and so were built up with weld then machined back to perfect - the housings were built up with white metal and had custom made bronze linings made and then machined to be a perfect match for the shafts.  Quick to write - but the process took very many hours of intense work!!