In case you have forgotten, this is what Jay was milling:

Now, I had left it up to Jay to take pictures of his progress so that I could post them here. However, when I saw what he had taken none of them really made sense to me. For instance, here is the next progress picture:

And so we have parts. Let’s take a closer look.

Oh yes. Very beautiful!

Aren’t you impressed? Then, of course, we have this:

It is a bar that was colored black. For most of this post you can imagine me looking at these and nodding in approval, but I really have no clue what I’m looking at.

Then there is this beautifully milled connector. It’s absolutely breath-taking!

Ah ha! The plot thickens! The bar is now marked and possibly cut. What will become of this poor little part??

We don’t know because suddenly we find ourselves looking at the lathe. With another part… hmmm… maybe the next picture will give us a little more detail.

Well, that didn’t work. It’s nice and shiny, but I don’t think that’s what we’re supposed to notice. This is why a girl shouldn’t post about these things.

It looks like we’ve milled a hole through the center of the block and are possibly cutting layers off of the hammer’s shaft.

Maybe the hammer thing is actually a piston thing? It looks like it will be moving up and down in a fashion that will end up turning the fly wheel.

This is a little better. You can see that the hammer head has now been milled and turned into what kind-of looks like a saddle stirrup.

All of those pieces put together gives us this much of the steam engine.

Now, because Jay is too involved in his hobby and not worried about taking pictures of his progress we are going to skip to the end.

Voila! A completed steam engine!

I placed the beer next to it so that you can get an idea of the size. It’s really just a little guy.

This picture isn’t the greatest, but you can kind of see the detail. When he finished the engine Jay was using this air compressor to run it. That only placated him for a little while. Then this showed up:

This is the boiler for the steam engine.

There are no progress pictures of this because he was much too excited to put it together.

He hand-riveted it and everything.

I believe that Jay has already burned through all of the bricks that came with the kit.

He is already making a list of other engines he would like for Christmas.

In the meantime, he has built a platform on which to display these two pieces:

Quite pretty, isn’t it?

So, there you have the steam engine.

Nice job, Jay!