Steam Department

Steady progress on a number of fronts in the steam shop this weekend.

There are no photographs this week as I spent most of the afternoon inside the firebox with an air hammer !.

On 1630 it was a case of pushing on with the same key tasks:

Progress in fitting fire tubes

·         We had a setback in the morning when the new tube roller, that had finally arrived, proved to be too small in diameter for the firebox tube ends.  The intent with the new roller had been to simultaneously seal the tube end into the tube sheet and make the flare, which is the first step towards beading the end of the tube.  Plan B was therefore adopted !.  The expander can be used to fully seal the tube ends into place.  It is just a slower process requiring a good deal more heavy work from the operator, which my wife would probably say is a darn good thing in my case !.  Essentially,  instead of air hammering each tube once to set it into place, fully sealing the end requires that you do this three times.  Each time the expander must be released by hammering the central pin, turned a little, hammered back into the tube end to seat it and then air hammered again.

Using this method, by end of day, we had set all but a few tubes higher up on the fireman's side.  All the tubes we set this weekend were subject to the full process so they are sealed and ready to rolled in the smokebox to seal them into the front tube sheet.  (The firebox end must be fully sealed to ensure that the tube cannot move before the front end is rolled ).  In addition a number that had been set last week were fully sealed.

The objective of this approach is that we now have a substantial number of tubes that can be sealed into the smokebox tubesheet, so that we can keep on working  in the smokebox when the patch team needs access to the firebox.

·         This week we had free access to the firebox as Dennis and Mike were finalizing the remaining holes in the patch away from the firebox.  The patch should be ready for final fitting next weekend.

·         Ed continued with the pipe fitting.  We have now reached the stage where I have to locate the pictures of how the cab fitting looked before stripping so that the cab end of the new pipes can be set up correctly.

·         Richard and Lorne removed the timber supporting the cab awning.  That became a fairly brutal process.  Since it was held to the cab by coach bolts and the timber had rotted, allowing the bolts to turn, cutting the nuts off in the cab was about the only method of getting the timber off the cab;

·         Vince was setting up for machining the spacing ring that we need to fit one of the super heater flues.  No one is real clear why but the hole for the top right super heater flue is about 1/4 inch bigger than all the others so requires a spacing ring when the flue is rolled into the sheet.

In other areas:

·         The decision was taken to set up the new compressor as a direct replacement of the existing one.  That means we will not set it up fully until the weather improves.  However we will need to ensure that it is fully tested before we start the replacement as we will have nothing but the Sullair as an air source while we do the switch;

·         Lorne continued the cleaning of the Shay truck.  Hopefully we should be able to finally inspect and repaint that shortly;

·         The new high pressure line for the planer was assembled;

·         A number of tasks were progressed on 428:

o   Tom is working on machining the new axle box wedges on the shaper;

o   Jerry continued grinding out the axle box channels in preparation for welding in the reinforcing plates;

o   Work restarted on reassembling the air pump.

Nigel