Sven J

Thank you for your appreciation and your kind words @idlemarvel!

@LEGO Train 12 Volts Thank you very much!

No, P4 and Olympia. Maybe it wasn't a very clever idea to hide them in the poorly-frequented "Special Themes" forum...

Very good find, and clever use of those! Would have saved me a lot of misprints and fits of temper if I had known them... My pleasure! At the moment I am photographing my reworked and much improved 7w "Columbo" Peugeot 403 (stay tuned). Maybe a worthy companion for your "White Elephant"? Or, more period-correct, the two Opels?

You're very welcome! Seeing other people building their own versions of my designs is the biggest compliment I can think of. Mille grazie for appreciating my SSKL so much! In fact I like your radiator sticker better than my own!

Yes. But you need a Stripe account, which prevents me from using the site.

That's a fundamental misunderstanding and, if I may say so, would be rather self-assertive if RB argued the same way. It's no loss for me, not in the least, as all my models were for free. On the contrary, it saves me time and nerves as I don't have to keep .io files 100% accurate and don't need to make instructions. So, if at all, it's a loss for the community, but it's not up to me to decide whether my models were of any value for anyone. And that shall have been the final words for me to say about this matter.

@zephyr1934 & @sergiomonai: I think that insulating jacket was common not only in the US, but quite everywhere (though, in later years, at least German railways used glass wool rather than asbestos). However, on many European steam engines the diameter of the smokebox was larger than that of the boiler proper - just by the amount that the insulating layer added to the boiler diameter, in order to achieve a clean look. Having said that, on old Prussian engines the smokebox had a considerably larger diameter than the boiler even with its insulating jacket included. This was to gain more space for the superheater equipment, but later turned out unneccessary.

Hi Sergio, great to hear from you again! What happened to your previous EB account? Yes, I remember, and this is probably quite a flexible design with regard to different diameters. Problem is, how can it be closed at the front without gaps? Best regards, Sven

Great! Let's hope they continue to supply their European retailer blokbricks.nl. These days it's not easy for EU residents to order from the US ...

It's new and promising!

Bricksafe is just an image-sharing platform. Instructions have moved to my cloud.

Thank you! Well, I haven't tried yet. But I suspect that, at least for longer boilers, they may not suffice. I like to have as much stability as possible ;-) Thanks, but it's actually not my own invention to use the steering wheel this way. Several train MOCers have done so before.

I understood it exactly that way Problem is, when you build it like that, you don't have those long plates any more running through from back to front, so the whole thing might be more prone to bending. It's the steering wheel from the classic 3829 assembly, mounted on a 20482 round tile instead.

@zephyr1934 The solution you describe above is exactly what I had in mind first. But that 1/2-plate "steps" in the corners looked ugly. Then I had the idea to fill those gaps with neck bracktes and had to find some way to attach them... Btw: Here's the first real-life build that uses the proposed design.