Brett Morley, the 1385’s boiler engineering expert from Performance Engineering provided a brief update on the 1385’s boiler production as of mid-June for the museum’s  member newsletter, the STEAMER. That article is reproduced here:

The flanged sheets worked on by Gary Bensman of Diversified Rail Services were completed and sent back to Continental Fabricators at the end of April. This was a little longer than we had hoped but the finished results were well worth the wait. I had instructed Continental not to proceed with any of the additional fabrication until the finished flanged sheets arrived and could be verified dimensionally. This proved to be a worthwhile wait as the sheets had to be altered a little in order to fit through one of Gary’s flanging dies. In order to fit his standard tooling he was forced to reduce the inside radius of the door sheet and rear flue sheet from 2” to 1.5”.

The deviation from the print does nothing to effect the boiler’s performance, nor would it be noticeable with the naked eye. It did however change the dimensions for the mud ring. We were able to adjust the boiler’s 3D model and produce a mud ring that fit the flanged sheets. Continental then proceeded to fabricate the mud ring to the new dimensions and ship it to SPEC Machine. It was test fitted for dimensional accuracy and all of the dimensions aligned as expected. While at SPEC we took the opportunity to drill and tap the underside of the mud ring to alleviate the need to do this after assembly. This negates the need to perform this task upside down ( a real pain). The completed mud ring was shipped back to Continental Fabricators at the end of May along with all of the new 5” flues that were previously housed at the museum.

Since the mud ring completion I have been updating the stay bolt layout for the throat sheet and backhead. The radius change required a slight change to the outer edge of the stay layout. We had known for some time that the original backhead layout needed some adjustment so this turned out to be the ideal time to perform this task. I completed the new layouts over in early June and began transferring them to Continental Fabricators on June 12th.