Steam Department

This Saturday saw continued progress in the Steam shop toward re-tubing 1630.

The penultimate bale of 37 tubes was swaged and annealed while the final bale was brought into the swaging area ready for processing.  The work done last Saturday on cleaning the rough edges from the dies of the swager seems to have worked well.  No further problems were encountered with rough surfaces on the swaged tube ends.

Good progress was made with cutting and loading so that, by end of day, we had 96 tubes loaded into the boiler.  This time Collin and Jason had the "hidden" role of fitting ferrules into the fire box tube sheet.  Here Collin is hard at work fitting ferrules and adjusting the position of the tube to the correct projection beyond the tube sheet.

Collin locating and ferruling in the firebox

Overall progress today was very good. 

Progress in fitting fire tubes

The boiler is now starting to look distinctly full of tubes. 

The boiler looks increasingly full

However, we have now decided that it would be safer to fit ferrules to some or all of the front tube sheet holes in order to reduce the risk of leakage.  This will require some measurement and testing and may require us to reload some of the tubes.  So that will be the main activity next week.

Meanwhile Mike, Bob and Tom worked on the final shaping of the firebox patch.

Ed and Matt continued with fitting the new pipe work along the boiler.

In other areas, Ralph worked on the axle boxes for 428 and prepared the surface of another box for babbit facing using the Bullard lathe.

Nigel