Office of Steam Forum for Model & Toy Steam Gas & Hot Air Engines

Beautiful lineup Charlie!!!

Please don´t get me wrong, i absolutely love the brass versions, and would love to have one myself, but i´ve always wondered about the story of these non-plated "mish-mash" 35s...
What made them decide to ignore the plating on the boiler, but still assemble the engine with several nickelplated parts here and there, instead of going all in and assembling it as a full brass colored engine?

Beautiful lineup Charlie!!!

Please don´t get me wrong, i absolutely love the brass versions, and would love to have one myself, but i´ve always wondered about the story of these non-plated "mish-mash" 35s...
What made them decide to ignore the plating on the boiler, but still assemble the engine with several nickelplated parts here and there, instead of going all in and assembling it as a full brass colored engine?

Here’s my thoughts on the brass engines.
Small parts like cylinders, safety valves, whistles, and sight glass blocks were likely made in large batches and sent to the plater, so these parts were most likely always on hand in quantity.
If an order comes in for some model 35s with a tight deadline and there’s no time to send all the boilers to the plater, then they go out the door in polished brass with the small parts being in nickel. Maybe these orders were negotiated at a lower cost. We all know Tom Jensen was a very frugal man and I’m sure he was very passionate about building steam engines, but when you are building them for a living, you can’t be passionate about the details of every one you build, to a certain extent. Maybe I’m a strange person, but I think about this stuff a lot. 🤣🤣