Illinois Railway Museum Blog

We are all hungry for Steam News so here is an UNOFFICIAL report sent to me for posting here, by Jim Opolony, one of the worker bees out in steam land.  Thank you, Jim.

"On June 25, the steam shop members learned how to remove rivets from the 1630's fire box.  Rivet heads were ground off inside the firebox.  Since we had never done this before, we had to decide which riveting gun would be the best to pound out the rivets.  Like always, we started slowly and used the smallest rivet gun.  We discovered that if we drilled out the center of the rivet, it made it possible for the rivet to collapse and hopefully come out a little easier. We also moved up to the largest rivet gun to get the rivets out faster.  We constantly added penetrating oil and pounded the rivets, with a small sledgehammer, back into the sheet so that they would come out faster.  We managed to remove two rivets.  Since a number of members were involved in the fund raiser on Saturday night, we stopped work relatively early.  Only four workers can do this job, so some shop members did other work.
 
Two members worked on 'truing up' one of the driving rods for the 428.  Glenn Parkhurst worked on the Bay City crane's engine."