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

A good day of progress on a number of fronts.

On 1630

·         Success at last on the swager.  Tom spent much of last Sunday honing the damaged bores in the dies.  We spent most of the morning carefully refitting and aligning them in the machine but it looks like we have success.  Several old tubes were successfully swaged and the machine operated smoothly throughout.  Now we are ready to go into production.  Having gone thru the set up the objective will be to do the tubes for both 1630 and the Shay so between 400 and 500 tubes in total.  The current major problem is that all the tubes are in the boxcars and the diesel guys were not able to switch these before the snow arrived.  So we are now dependent upon a break in the weather to allow the boxcars to be switched to a position where we can move the large bunches of tubes to and from the shop.

What does swaging achieve?.  The tubes of a steam locomotive boiler are expanded by rollers into the tube sheets to make the seal.  Commonly the tube diameter in the firebox tube sheet is smaller than the general diameter of the tube.  This is a crafty piece of steam locomotive design.  For efficiency you want as much tube area as you can achieve in contact with the water.  The hottest, and therefore most stressed tube sheet, is the firebox end.  So narrowing a couple of inches of the tube where it runs into this tube sheet allows more metal to remain in the tube sheet between the holes.  So on 1630 (and the Shay) the tubes are 2 inch diameter but are shrunk by swaging to 1 7/8 at the firebox end.

The objective of the whole process can now be seen in one of the test tubes.

A swaged tube looks like this

The process is first to heat the end in a furnace

Into the furnace

then hammer it between the dies, that we have had so much fun with, for about 15 seconds turning it as it is hammered so that you get a nice even 1 7/8 inch tube end.

The swager finally working

·         The dome cover was successfully removed to allow lapping of the throttle valve which is one of the key repairs to be carried out.  The fork lift made life a great deal easier as the cover could slid directly onto the forks and brought down to the ground.

Just slide it sounds easy!

The forklift makes this a lot easier

At ground level you can see how big and heavy it is

·         It is now clear that we have 4 or 5 stays on the back head where the sleeves are sufficiently worn to need replacing so that will start soon.

·         Mike continued with grinding out the rivet and patch bolt holes to enable fitting of the firebox corner patch.

On 428 an number of machining jobs were progressed

·         Bob and others continued honing the coupling rods to allow new bushes to be fitted;

·         Stu and Cameron continued with the packing glands; and

·         Tom and Cameron worked on the set up of a large piece for horizontal drilling.  (Looked very impressive but I did not like to disturb the efforts by querying exactly what it was!).

Around the shop Jeff continued the program to free up more working areas.

·         The space is now ready to safe end the super heater flues for 1630 which are coming back from sandblasting in the next week or so;

·         Some unused machines were moved out of the machine shop which will enable a really challenging move of a large turret lathe from the wheel lathe area to the machine shop.  This will allow the turret lathe to be activated and enable wheels to be stored away from the door and overhead crane;

·         We also lifted the McCabe flanger so that it can be properly mounted on timbers that will allow it to be moved.  This will free up space to handle large numbers of tubes that are to be swaged.

So another productive weekend.

Nigel

There was a good turnout today at the Steam Department which allowed a lot to be done.  Unfortunately, as is the way with a major inspection, some of it leads to the identification of more work than we had previously hoped.

On 1630

·         Collin and Eric made good progress on clearing the tell tale holes in the firebox stays.  These small holes, drilled along the length of the stay, are so named as they cause water / steam to leak out if the stay cracks.  As part of the inspection we must ensure that all of these holes (which tend to become obstructed with ash and other debris in service) are clear to the required depth.  This is done with rods, air jets and, in extreme, drills.  As 1630 was not in service much since this was last done progress was good and no significant issues detected so far.  This view shows the different types of stay on the firebox side with an area of rigid stays at the lower right and area of flexible stay caps above and left.

Firebox stays to be checked

·         Less positively, inspection of the caps covering the heads of flexible stays in the firebox back head showed that some are heavily corroded.  We will need to assess these in more detail but it looks as if we will need to replace a number of these stays.

·         Matt worked on methods for cleaning the inner surface of the boiler barrel.  This has a deposit that seems to be primarily iron from the water on top of the special "paint" applied at the last overhaul.  We had hoped to be able to remove the deposit and avoid recoating the boiler.  Having tried both chemical and physical methods it is clear that this will not be practical so the whole boiler interior will need to be sand blasted.  The first picture below shows the interior of the boiler looking forward.  Wire brushing has removed some deposit from the bottom of the boiler.  The second picture shows the firebox crown sheet and the stays that support it.  This clearly shows the most critical area that we must sand blast and inspect.  The curved seam at the front of the crown sheet is a high risk area for cracking and must be thoroughly cleaned and inspected.

Inside the boiler barrel

Firebox crown sheet and stays

·         Jeff set up and tested the sand blaster.  Over the next couple of weeks we will assess the cost of getting what is now a lot more sand blasting done by a contractor versus the time of doing it in house.

·         Work continued on the swager.  Getting the dies to move smoothly and reliably is proving a frustrating exercise.  We reinstalled them and largely swaged a test tube - but then they seized again.  This shows the dies on the bench.  They should (and did) bounce freely on the springs but Ralph is here having to forced them apart with a bolt.

It should slide smoothly!

Glenn and Phil completed the set up and testing of the air and power steering on the Bay City crane.  Amazing.  When  it was moved into the current position (pushed by the fork lift) it required huge effort to turn the steering wheel at all.  Now it turns when stationary with one hand!.  With this is done it will probably wait until Spring before we actually move it and address issues such as adjusting the brakes so that they release correctly.

On 428 work progressed on several areas:

·         Bruce and others worked on the detail layout for rebuilding the axle boxes.  The steel for this is now in-house and, once the layout is complete, the rebuilding can begin.  Bruce and Tom with one of the axle boxes and the material to be used to rebuild it.

Measure twice cut once!

·         Stu and Bob continued rebuilding the air pump.

·         Tom and Jeff worked on setting up the shaper for the shows and wedges.

·         Machining continued on the new packing glands.

In other areas:

·         Dave continued cleaning the Shay truck

·         Rick built the panels that will separate the steel fabrication area from the machining area; and

·         Bob, Eric and others worked on options for set up of the wheel lathe.

Nigel