Pack 6 - Stage 31. Steam pipes for the port engine.

[Mark, The Master Modeller]

Stage 31 takes us back to the port engine and give sis the steam pipes.

The first stage is to fit the 8 gangways.  These are awkward blighters as they are buried in the engine and need gluing!  Apply a drop of superglue to the 4 pins on the gangway then hold it in place with tweezers until the glue has cured.  I started with the easiest one!  Make sure that it is straight and vertical.  

Repeat with the remaining 7 gangways.  I added a drop more glue to each of the outer pins to reinforce the joint after they had all been fitted.  Just to give them a bit more strength, ensuring that they didn't fall out later!  Call me Mr. Paranoid!

Glue the reversing gear and the 'detail' 31J (This looks like an oil tank to me, but that's just an educated guess) to the base of the engine.  

The instructions say to glue the hand wheel to the support and then glue it in place.  However, I thought it easer to glue the support in place first....

And then glue the hand wheel t the support.

Take pipe B and glue it to the top of the engine columns.

Now take pipe D and glue it to the bottom of the cylinder and the engine plinth.  Insert the pin in the engine plinth first, then insert the top pin in the cylinder.  

Take the steam turbine pipe and press it into the holes in the two outer cylinders.  

For those who are interested in the engineering, the Titanic had two reciprocating engines, that we are in the process of building, and a single steam turbine.  The steam from the boiler was used to drive the reciprocating engines.  However, the exhaust steam from these engines still had a fair amount of energy in it.  So the exhaust steam was used to drive steam turbine to extract as much energy from the steam as possible.  This improved the efficiency of the vessel quite significantly.  

The exhaust steam from the turbine then went through a condenser where it was called by seawater to turn it back into water.  Then it was pumped back into the boiler.

Fit pipe E below the turbine pipe.

Push the low pressure pipes into the other side of the cylinders.

Fit pipe C to the outer cylinders.  This sits between the two low pressure pipes.

This completes the stage.