Conclusion

January 2010

I am obviously very pleased with the outcome, in fact it has exceeded my expectations.  I found myself just standing looking at it and understanding for the first time how it is that some engineers will spend years building something and then put it in a glass case never to be used.  I don't belong to that category however, I built this to run and enjoy.

It's been a bumpy ride at times, this was after all one of the first batch of this new model and we were all learning to some degree as we went along.  Me, because I'd never built anything like this before and have no engineering experience, Andy and Geerlig facing challenges due to the new design and some delays in getting parts out.  Overall it's taken a couple of months longer than I thought it would, partly due to my decision to go for steam at the first opportunity (it was still worth it!)  

The attention to detail in Geerlig's design is very evident from the finished model which looks just like the original.  Similarly the quality of the parts supplied by Andy is proven by the relatively little work I had to do to them and the fact that they all joined up properly in the end!  Would I do it all again and would I recommend a friend? Absolutely!!

I took her to the club last Sunday on a sunny but cold day for a trial run and to show her off to my group of friends. All went well with the boiler producing vast quantities of steam with the safety lifting a lot of the time.  This is in stark comparison with my elderly Polly 2 (made before Andy took over the company) which does struggle in cold weather.  The only downside was that the axle pump gave up working after the first couple of laps.  The injector kept us going - so much that I didn't need to use the hand pump at all.

I've since taken the the axle pump pipework to pieces and it now seems to be fine.  I've found there are some flakes of paint in the side tanks - I probably should have washed them out before final assembly - and I'm guessing one of those jammed the ball valve on the pump intake.  I'll find out this coming Sunday when I'm hoping to go back for another trial run.  I'll have to keep an eye on the water level for a while to make sure it doesn't happen again.

So that's the end of my little adventure.  I'll post some more pictures on the gallery when I can get some good ones taken and of course I'd be very happy to hear from other Caroline builders, or prospective builders.  I hope these ramblings might convince you to have a go like I did.  Don't read too much into the little problems we had along the way, I'm sure the next batch of kits will have all those sorted by the time they go out.

Happy steaming!