Wood Shop

Despite the title of many of these entries, remember that while the Wood Shop DOES make a lot of sawdust, there are three distinct shop areas contiguous to the south wall of Barn 4.  You will see a lot of activity and work not necessarily sawing wood!

We completed making new decking for the track department as Victor Humphreys is stacking and inspecting the finished pieces.

Does that caption sound familiar?  Tim Peters is somewhat hobbled, but he continues to work on the Chicago Rapid Transit 1797 project.

A man whose skills know no limits, Tim began modifying and reworking porcelain light sockets to be 'correct' for use in the 1797

Here is a little side trip to show some work being done on our Kansas City PCC car.  This is a regular effort, I just happened to catch some pics this weekend.  Mike Stauber is working on one of the door leafs, removing paint and figuring a way to repair the rusted out sections.

On the other side of the shop, Frank Sirinek was cleaning and inspecting the glass diffusers or covers for the ceiling lights on the Kansas City PCC.

There are a LOT of lights in the Kansas City PCC car and on Sunday, Frank was still at it.  He has moved to a different work table.  Did he wear out the one yesterday or just wanted better light?

Victor Humphreys is making adjustments to a special clamping jig as we just assembled a new window for the fireman's side of Norfolk & Western 2050.  This is an odd shape sash, and fabricating it was made somewhat tricky with the lack of right angles.

OK, this is not exactly a new subject, it is WINDOW glass.  Ray Schmidt has been cleaning this art glass panel for the Michigan Electric 28 for a lot of hours.  There were an estimated three coats of paint on this, applied when the car was used as a cottage.  And of course, that was applied to the textured side of this pressed glass.

Here is better idea of the glass panel, destined to be in a paired window upper sash arrangement.  By day's end it was either so sparkling clean, or Ray simply gave up on more cleaning.  It was placed in the waiting restored window frame and glazing proceeded.

We cannot leave out George Clark and his work on the Lake Shore Electric 810.  Recently reported was the work to prime and paint new siding, and here are two metal parts, a door track and side rub rail that will soon be finish painted and installed.

The sawdust and sparks were really flying yesterday and we would like to thank the many new volunteers helping on project work.  As with anything it is important to establish hierarchy and assign meaningful (?) job titles right from the beginning.  Do not take me too seriously, no one else does!

The Cleveland PCC saw new volunteer Dave Rogan (APPRENTICE) return to help install interior panels with Simon Harrison ( newly promoted to APPRENTICE MANAGER).  ASSISTANT INTERIM WEEKDAY PROJECT MANAGER Lorne Tweed oversaw the assignments

Al Reinschmidt returned again and 'volunteered' to resume restoration of the window tracks.  Lorne looks quite delighted to have a new volunt- - -  (victim) while Al is seriously considering his prospects.

For once not WINDOW tracks, but instead new decking for two of our four wheeled track carts.  Dick Cubbage and Victor Humphreys are cutting long planks to size.

Victor surveys the planks stacked on one of our shop carts.  A seemingly simple process but one that occupied two guys for a few hours.  There are a LOT of pieces.

Buzz Morisette was working on repairs to an interior door for what I was told is for Illinois Terminal 233.  The bottom rail was mostly rotted away and a new piece of mahogany will be made.

George Clark continues to prepare, prime, and paint new siding for Lake Shore Electric 810.  Weather just a little warmer will see a crew working in the barn to install these.

Pete Galayda met no resistance as he continued to ready a headlight resistance box to install in the Charles City Western 300 locomotive.

Gerry Dettloff is fitting a keeper rod behind the head of a new hardened pin in this truck.  The truck is from TM 972, part of the work for our TMS Project.  Sadly, the next image in this sequence is not posted.  The acetylene tank was empty and I migrated to other tasks, before the cylinder was replaced.

Buzz Morisette has glazed several of the new windows he built for ATSF 1400 caboose.  They are a thing of beauty.  Here he is wrestling with clean up of the gooey butyl rubber compound we use in place of traditional glazing putty.  That old fashioned glazing putty hardens and shrinks, falls out and fails over time.  This stuff has stood the test of time, maintaining a flexible watertight seal for several years.  But it can be troublesome to work with.

With much of the cleaning behind him, Buzz is ready to add the final coat of gray interior paint to the windows.

Nick Kallas was visiting the shop, and Victor Humphreys is showing him the complicated joinery for a new window for Norfolk & Western 2050.  The steel plate beside the new wood parts is a 'new' discovery in the past week.  The finished wood window gets a fairly heavy sheet of metal placed over its exterior.

Dan Fenlaciki helped glue and square up two more new windows for Illinois Central 3996 Diner.  Six are now so assembled.

Could that caption be wrong?  No, Marcus Ruef delivered new lumber for the wood shop crew to make up new decking for two of our four wheel track cars.  Those guys just do not like to work in comfort - it has to be either too cold or too hot for them to really enjoy themselves.  So our wood shop sawdust guys will do the cutting.

Call me all about lazy, or all about easy.  But this time I will put all project work under the Wood Shop category.  Let's start out with Cleveland Transit System 4223.

I would like to extend a warm welcome to Dave Rogan who is a new volunteer at IRM.  He walked in in the morning and by afternoon was hard at work on doing the window sash restoration work on CTS 4223.

Al Reinschmidt is a long time member and volunteer but he made a fairly rare Wednesday appearance and also joined in the fray, here shown cleaning some of the tracks for the windows.

Lorne Tweed is a regular worker on the 4223 project and as usual it was hard to distract him with corny jokes. Very committed to the work at hand.  Not in these pics was Simon Harrison - yes - working on more sash.  The good news is that the stack of completed parts and sash is looking much larger than the stack of items remaining.

Buzz Morrisette is on the home stretch for the large batch of new windows for ATSF 1400 caboose.  We caught him mitering and cutting to length the many small strips of quarter round to retain the glazing.

Tim Peters is 'back in the saddle' or in this case making a set of new saddles for the roof of Chicago Rapid Transit 1797.  There is something about the smell of white oak sawdust early in the morning.

John Faulhaber is sighting along two pieces destined to become new windows for Illinois Central diner 3996.  We try to mass produce parts exactly the same for each new 'order' or group of windows, but the last step is to match and custom fit the pieces before gluing.

Victor Humphreys, Simon Harrison, and I took two of the completed frame sets and got them permanently glued and in the press to set up while being held square and true.

Pete Galayda just keeps plugging along on the Charles City Western 300 locomotive.  He is working to restore a headlight resistance box and it sits beside a newly refinished controller cover.

Here is a quick tour of some of the work we saw going on in the Wood Shop yesterday. You may notice the recurring theme of WINDOWS - good work in the shop during the winter, and we never seem to run out of them.

John Faulhaber has been under the weather lately but we welcomed him back and promptly put him to work on fitting the frames for the new windows for Illinois Central 3996.

Buzz Morisette continued making new windows for Santa Fe 1400 caboose.  Here he has manufactured small quarter round to be used in holding the glazing, and is painting them.

Victor Humphreys (pictured) and I worked to resolve the odd angles and many parts for new windows on the front of the cab for our Norfolk & Western 2050 locomotive.  These are really different and seemingly no parallel edges.  Tough work when there are only 'shards' of an incomplete original to work from.

Simon Harrison continued cleaning the aluminum sash for our Cleveland Transit 4223 PCC car.

Roger Kramer cleaned and primed several pieces of hardware destined for our Pullman FLOYD RIVER.  I believe this car has examples of open section berths, once so common, and found in a few of the cars in our collection

Here are four new bushings machined to order, here resting in the midst of their heat treatment.  A total of six new were made today.  Earlier in the week Gerry Dettloff did some fitting and grinding to mate the new pedestal liners to the truck frames.

Gwyn Stupar, Victor Humphreys, and Greg Kepka are working on a project to produce new cab windows for Norfolk & Western 2050.  We initially tried to trace the frame outlines on flimsy cardboard, used those to create working drawings, and now this crew is tracing and cutting thin plywood templates.  After those were made, they climbed up on the running boards and into the cab to confirm size and shape.  The result is some minor edits to the drawings, which should make these window just right.

Buzz Morrisette has made all new jambs and sash trim for the 14 new windows he is making for caboose ATSF 1400.  He painted the red finish color on all those pieces and on most of the new sash.

Then Buzz and Frank Sirinek cut twenty eight pieces of glass for the project and washed and cleaned those.

Buzz is looking over a new machine recently donated and added to our shop arsenal of tools.  It is a mechanized saw blade sharpener, I think able to take up to 20 inch diameter blades, and it has several settings to allow it to file different positive or negative hook angles on the teeth.  Anyone want to give it a run?

I resisted titling this image with the ubiquitous WINDOW caption.  But Roger Kramer is installing weatherstripping on some of the nearly finished shop made windows for the GLEN SPRINGS

Henry Vincent is project manager for our proposed model railroad display and he cannot wait to get to work.  He has hand made frames for many of the pictures from the layout in Milwaukee and they now provide 'shop art' in our new addition to the shop space.

Some view painting as a necessary evil at best, but it is a critical step to restoring and preserving equipment.  George Clark is painting the first coat of finished orange on new siding for Lake Shore Electric 810.

Henry Vincent is discussing a repair to a baggage wagon tongue with Victor Humphreys.  It looks they are enjoying this too much for words.

Last weekend Jon Fenlaciki caught me in the act of fitting new mortise and tenon joints, paring wood carefully by hand with a chisel.  Not really news, but here I am - guilty as charged.