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

sorry to hear that you cant get it running (yet) Doug, I had this model (sold on to Mike ,Maxwell) @ cabin fever 2 years ago, when I 1st got mine it wasn't a strong runner....but would run, when I saw you initial post I wanted to answer for you what the problem might be ,but for the life of me I cant remember what I did to mine to make it a strong runner, best I can recall it was a lot of small things...& I remember working with the top of the hoop quite a bit, I had a bix burner which I think really helped. I remember I had to totally disassemble the water pump & clean it because the check ball was stuck in the bottom port. & mine would be very difficult to get running when you had water in the jacket on initial start up....I would get it running & then introduce the cooling water after it warmed up in a few minutes, these take quite a bit off heat as I recall.  as I'm writing all this, things are coming back to me. I know I worked on mine over 2 weekends.
hope this helps in the future.
SPS, Bruce