With the timber now in stock I cut the first lower side rod section.  However I was unable to finish it as the belt sander motor burnt out.

I started to assemble the previously prepared and painted floorboard pieces and ran into two problems.  Firstly, one of the pieces seems to have vanished and secondly even if I had it, it would no longer fit.  As this job really was not a good ‘un, I decided to make a couple of replacement sections and paint them after fitting as it seemed they grew during painting!

I examined the sheet metal for the entrance steps after the first coat of primer and decided the curved section needed to be improved with a skim of filler, so applied the first couple of layers and sanded it.