We are progressing with the building of the boiler. The first job is drilling all the holes in the steam and mud drums.

We have 1,236 to do, and so far we have finished 824 of them – it’s boring!

The first 823 were the worst!

The next job is to use a countersink bit on a air ratchet (hopefully) to de-burr the inside of all the holes.

Then we will mount the drums into the casing end-plates. and start fitting the tubes… We are using Ashby Welding in Church Crookham to plasma-cut the casing bits from 3mm plate, while the 20mm boilerplate blanks for the drum end covers and the economiser and super-heater headers are being provided by Brown McFarlane in Stoke on Trent.

Here is a picture of the CAD drawings I created to drive the plasma cutting machine…

lifu-housing-componentsv2

all the holes in place!

All the Holes drilled