NEW P2 BEATING THE PANDEMIC
Recent progress on the building of a P2 for the 21st century has been steady rather than spectacular. However, good headway is being made on several fronts, the most recent high spot being the recent delivery of the first pair of coupling rods.
Covid-19 still affects output, particularly for our suppliers and subcontractors, where while not suffering from infections in their establishments, have had staff members having to isolate for two weeks at a time due to family or close friends being infected or in contact with the disease.
Despite the obstacles created by the pandemic, the project has continued to move forward over the past three months.
We now have the profiles for the ‘shelf’ under the back of the cab and our contractor Ian Matthews has started making some special tooling to facilitate hot bending of the 20mm thick plate to form the flanges on each end which mate with the outer Cartazzi frame plates.
Platework
Normally, shaping like this is carried out cold using a brake press forming a series of small bends, however, the radius required in this case is equal to the thickness of the material necessitating the bending to be undertaken at
