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About this time in the build I found this thread. It was so helpful to be able to read through the ideas and setup for the parts. There aren't a lot of threads on the PM4 /PM6 builds and some of the parts are quite difficult. I decided to do the valve caps in brass for a little bling, although...

I repaired the eccentric follower by drilling the arms and making a new boss. I thought a car main cap design would look appropriate, along with studs and nuts.

It's really quite a pretty part.

While I was thinking about how to machine the rest of the body, I tackled the cross slide. Now on the PM1 kit there is a sprue on one of the smaller castings that allows you to mount it in the lathe. You then cut the sprue off when you've finished. Looking at the combined valve eccentric...

I made a drill extension and drilled the afore mentioned mounting holes.

The main body casting is tricky. It is nearly too big for my mill and completely too big for my lathe. And it has no easy registration surface to work with. I used a very large file to smooth off the top rib on the cross slide bore as best as I could. I then set the casting up on the mill bed...

So I bored the valve. I then glued the cap (prepared earlier) onto the cylinder with good quality cyanoacrylate glue and drilled the holes for the lower cylinder cap.

I used the chamfer on the end of my drill chuck to centre the piece. I double checked the centre with an edge finder and it was very accurate.

As I needed to do the valve cylinder bore and drill holes in the mill, I opted to machine the other face parallel at the same time.

I started out with the cylinder. Fairly straightforward setup in a 4 jaw. I elected to use an angle grinder to remove the surface scale layer to make initial machining easier and to get the top surface approximately flat. To make setup easier I machined up a mandrel out of round bar. This...

So. Why bother to post this? Well, to be honest, because the PM4 kit presents some challenges to the novice home machinist (people like me). Parts of it are too big to fit in our little lathes. Some of the design has flaws that can lead to failures in components. And the castings require us...

In mid 2020, courtesy of covid, I found some YouTube videos on making a small model steam engine. It was the PM Research PM1, and both Blondihacks and Joe Pieczynski have excellent video series detailing it's manufacture. I ordered one, and mostly, by copying what Joe and Quinn did I managed...

Apologies for hijacking an old thread but I've found all of this very useful and want to add my 2c worth with my own PM4 build. Firstly, many, many thanks to Vederstein. I've read all of the posts in great detail and they've helped me enormously with my build. Also, thanks to all of you others...