Illinois Railway Museum Blog

The holiday spirit was all around us and the smell of sawdust filled the air as a few souls put their other activities on hold and came out to work in the shops.

Defying Gravity

Tim Peters continued on his monumental quest to get new windows made for the Chicago Rapid Transit 1797.  While Randy Hicks stopped by to consult on his work for the CA&E 36, we caught this odd image of a new window sash defying gravity.  Actually Tim modified a commercial jig to drill angled mounting holes in the sash.  If you have been following these entries for some time, you may remember seeing a more elaborate home made contraption over a year ago, which was used to do a similar task for CRT 1268 windows.

Ripping Good Times

Roger Kramer, John Faulhaber, and Rich Witt made a lot of progress yesterday on our job to build nine new windows for Illinois Central 3996.

Production

Rich and John set up the various jigs and featherboard on the table saw and Roger and John continued to process the pieces.  Altogether 36 pieces of stock were handled.  The blanks were ripped to size, a roundover beading created on the table mounted router, and the rabbet cut on the table saw to accommodate the glazing.  Rich laid out the needed mortise slots on the stiles, and Roger squared off and cut all the top and bottom rails to length.  A good days work!

New Item

I have been working to build a new jig for window work, to square and size rails on any of our new window projects.  It is a bit of a challenge to make this out of hard maple, essentially to machinist tolerances, and to envision the needed adjustments and flexibility to handle whatever the future holds in store.  Rich Witt helped out by patiently listening to my tale of needed functions and closely examining some of the seven pieces seen here, and contributing suggestions and tips.