Illinois Railway Museum Blog

A good day with continuing progress on a number of fronts but one major bust from the blog perspective.

Note to self - the camera may appear to work but actually works a whole lot better if you remember to put the memory card back in after downloading the previous week's pictures - So not many pictures this week although I thought I had pictures of the firebox tube end removal in progress!!

On 1630:

• Collin continued the removal of tube ends.  He is now down to a handful of small tubes and the super heater flues.  Barring unexpected problems this should be done next Saturday.

• Mike, Brian and others started to cut out the defective piece of the firebox corner.  First the section over the mud ring will be cut with a grinder then Dennis will make the rest of the cut with his specialized cutting gear.  The work with the grinder in now well under way.

Cutting out the corner Step 1

The hoses crossing the picture supply the parallel activity of cutting and driving out the tube ends.

• The super heater flues were loaded on the flat bed truck to go to a specialist sand blasting company for cleaning.  Once this is done they will come into the shop to be safe ended ready for re-installation.

Superheater flues going off site

• The swager was mounted ready for use. This sounds simple but I can assure you that getting several hundred pounds of metal with eight precisely drilled holes to fit on to 8 rods in a stand is a challenge that had some of us in the shop until 10 last night!!

Swager in place

• A good deal more material was moved out to the boxcar or onto racking to free up the space where we will work on the super heater flues when they return from cleaning.

Dennis started work on the smokebox of the Shay.  First job was to caulk the new section of the tube plate into the barrel.  This required air hammering the join between the tubeplate and the barrel with a specially shaped tool to completely close any tiny gaps between the two plates.  That is now done and he will start fitting up the new sections of plate for the smokebox floor.

Tubesheet caulked into place

The bright line between 5 and 7 o'clock between the new tube sheet section and the boiler barrel shows where the plates have been caulked.

Bruce and Stu worked on the measurement and machining patterns for the shoes and wedges for 428.  This is a critical piece of preparation for machining these parts.  Wooden patterns have to be made and fitted to the locomotive frames to prove that, if everything is machined to these dimensions, the three dimensional jigsaw will all fit together with the required tolerances.  The trouble with these beautiful old locomotives is that, after years of repair and modification, you can never be sure that the drawings you have are all consistent so that everything will be correct if you work simply from the drawings.

Glen continued the reassembly of the Bay City crane.  We hit a few problems with the cold temperature and a drain plug with suspect threads but believe the running of the motor in the crane for the first time in 20 years is imminent.

Nigel