Steam Department

The snow made for a pretty quiet weekend at the steam shop.  Only a couple of brave souls made it to Union and Saturday.  I got there Sunday along with Tom, Jason and Brian.

Jason and Brian made good progress on cleaning and needle chipping most remaining areas of the boiler and the various pipes running along the outside of the boiler ready for testing. 

Needle chipping the firebox

Pipework ready for testing

The area remaining to be cleaned off is the one that everyone dreads - the underside of the barrel.  This is the real fun area requiring that you crawl under the boiler and brush / needle chip directly above where you are lying - gravity then ensures that most of what you remove lands on you!!.

I just about completed the set up for swaging ready to bring tubes in from the box car. 

However that will now be of lesser priority than getting the inside of the boiler sand blasted.  Potential contractors for sand blasting are not willing to do the boiler interior at a reasonable price so we need to do it ourselves.  Given that this will require several days use of a respirator helmet and  subsequent use for welding inside 1630's tender, we have acquired a suitable pump.  It is now the first priority to set the boiler up so that dust is generally contained within it and can be exhausted outside the shop.  The we can get on with the job.

I also got the help of Bob Kutella on modifying the timbers of the McCabe flanger so that it can be moved more easily.  Unfortunately this requires timber that we could not get on a Sunday so hopefully that will be done next week.

No report from me next weekend as I am in Florida for a week.  Let's hope that we have a lot to report in 2 weeks.

Nigel