Illinois Railway Museum Blog

It will be a short and late update this weekend as I went on the Zephyr trip today.  What a great day.  Tremendous effort by the team.  Well done guys for making it a such great experience for those of us who just had to sit back and enjoy ourselves.

As regards Saturday at the steam shop hopefully all the bad things for a while happened this weekend!!.

First, the most critical job now to be done is painting the interior of the boiler, which can only be done by a small number of our team who can fit thru the access hatch to work inside the boiler.  Unfortunately one is facing a serious family health problem and the rest had other commitments so we were unable to progress the painting this weekend.

So we focused on setting up to prepare the tubes for fitting.  Each tube must be swaged (reduced in diameter from 2 to 1 7/8 inch at the firebox end), annealed at the smoke box end and then cut to exact length.  The original game plan was to complete the set up and then try a few test runs before maybe doing the first few tubes.  Sadly this was not to be.  We brought the first tubes in without problem

Bringing in the first new tubes

However when we tried to start the Sullair compressor, to drive the furnace and swager, the starter solenoid stuck causing the starter to burn out!!.  Having disconnected the battery and put out the fire, investigation revealed that the nose of the starter must have fractured a while back and just got into a position where it caused the solenoid to stick. 

No doubt why the starter failed

So we wait one week to rebuild the starter and hope we can start swaging next week.  Anyway, the area is now ready and the first 40 tubes were brought in and set ready for work.

Swaging set up now ready to go

Another piece of bad news was about the ferrules.  As noted last week, we received ferrules but they were 2 inch ID versus 2 inch OD.  The bad news proves to be that the supplier no longer makes 2 inch OD.  Unless someone else makes them we will have another very tedious job.  The alternative, if we cannot buy them ready-made, is to cut 150 5/8 inch long sections from 2 inch copper tube.  A perfectly practical but dull and time consuming job.

To complete our woes for the day, Ed and Bob were continuing to the fit of the pipe work.  The simple job of heating a nut to remove it from the stud to allow the pipe bracket to be adjusted to the new pipe took a good part of the day.  What first seemed to be an empty acetylene cylinder proved to be a regulator than had gummed up and will need to be reconditioned.

On a more positive note we went thru with B&G the plans for grading in front of the shop and preparing to install the new air compressor to feed the new shop.  This will allow us to rivet (and swage) without relying on the Sullair.  We were also able to work with Jeff on the layout for the air supply in the new shop.

So some overall progress despite a number of setbacks.  Let's hope for better this week.

Nigel