A strange day.  We seemed to be doing not a lot but ended up with a transformation. 

Jim and I spent the morning getting all the details right on the catenary rods.  I worked on all the screws holding the brackets to the monitor ribs and got them all seated properly and fully tightened without breaking any of them.  They are brass so twist to break quite easily.  Jim spent some time sorting out the corner panels in the monitors and then seating the pattresses at B end.  I then sorted the D end pattresses and got them screwed in. Meanwhile I started rubbing down and priming some newly arrived steelwork. I had collected the spring hangers from Fidaport on Monday and a new contributor, Brian Hackney who lived near Bernard, had offerred to do some lathe and other metalwork.  He had called last week and took the draw gear away to slot the main part so that the push rod can be inserted to fit it.  No pictures of this but it is a very simple way of fitting the rod which a picture in due course will explain.  Anyway he has done a great job very quickly and so Ian scraped off two years of surface rust before putting on the primer.

In the afternoon, whilst Ian was busy painting, Jim and I started to tighten up the catenary rods.  After only 1 1/2 turns on each nut, the temporary roof prop fell out. This proved that the rods were doing their job of keeing the body from bowing.  A quick measure showed that there is no trace of sag in the sides.

This success inspired Jim to tidy up and sweep out the saloon ready for varnishing the ceiling.

As we now had a clean tram we spent the last hour having a design conference about how to fit the stairs.  I made a temporary landing for D end from some old plywood and we then placed a staircase in position to get some idea of what needs to be trimmed at top and bottom.  The answer was not very much but it threw up various questions about positioning the stairs but the end result was this.

What a transformtion and a trbute to Bernard's measuring and plotting skills, not to mention all Jim's hard work while I was on holiday.  It completely alters the appearance of the tram.