Illinois Railway Museum Blog

I was not getting around too well yesterday so this may seem short to you all.  I am posting under the CGW X38 header since most of this entry is about that work.

We started the day with John Faulhaber and Victor Humphreys (not shown) assembling, gluing and clamping three new windows for the snowplow.  Yes the winter season is upon us and we hope to produce a steady stream of new windows  These are quite recognizable already but remember there remain seven more steps in the process to complete them.

With the frames glued and squared, John and I moved on to the next batch of windows.  A lot of headscratching and layout work on two large planks of fresh stock, use of three of our major shop tools, and the result?  A stack of parts to be used as KITS for eight more windows, destined for the cupola cab of the snowplow.  John seems quite pleased at the results (I was also - see me smiling behind the lens?).  We are doing them this way since they all share the same profiles and rabbets.  Once that tooling is set up, it makes sense to do them all at the same time, sort of mass production.

Meanwhile Victor was in and out of the shop, lending a hand where needed and yet returning to his work on the B&O wagon top boxcar.  Even in marginal weather there is work to be done, sometimes darting in and out of the great outdoors.  Earlier this week more bad steel was removed, and this revealed some flooring in pretty bad shape.  Here, Victor is grooving out one of the new boards so it can be correctly fit around obstructions and rivets.

Earlier he had completed finish painting of the door weatherstripping for the snowplow.  And of course the usual suspects were on hand.  Buzz Morisette was working on restoring deteriorated headlining and car structure in the rear end of the the private car ELY, Tim Peters working on his marathon speed run for a new roof on an L car, assisted by Frank Sirinek, Mike Stauber, Fred Zimmerman, and Bill Wulfert, Randy Hicks (guru for all things CA&E wood), and a host of others.

I even managed some sit down time and worked on new brass seat handle castings for the Sand Springs 68.

This will be another quick look at what I saw going on yesterday inside the wood shop.

The the annual running of the Halloween time Terror event is over and it is time for the volunteers to start repairing the damage to equipment, seemingly inevitable every year.  Roger Kramer assigned himself the job of repairing several broken windows.  I bet he has a tough boss for this job.

I saw parts being painted, the saw parts that Henry Vincent has been working on.  Have you seen the saw parts?

We saw those parts last week.  Or did we?  Buzz Morisette was working on a template pattern for new carlines to replace some well rotted wood ones in the X 5000 dynamometer car.  Here he seems to be fitting up a piece of wood for the interior lining of the X 38 snowplow.

Speaking of the X 38, there was a lot of  woodworking progress yesterday.  It was not exactly planned this way, but here is TEAM A, John Faulhaber and Simon Harrison, custom fitting a mortise and tenon joint.  In the morning none of the pieces had been ready for this stage of this work.  But after lunch all 12 pieces had been mortised and the tenons cut.  Up to this point it is somewhat of a mass production set up, all parts receiving much the same operation.

Now that the windows are starting to take shape and be recognizable, each group of four parts is marked for one window, and each of the four joints is custom trimmed and fit.  These two culprits are Jim Leonard and Dave Rogan.  Three of the four volunteers had never really done this type of work for us, but they did just fine.  At the end of the day all three frames destined for the rear end and two side windows of the X 38 were ready for glue.

Much of the work in this shop has the goal of taking a really big piece of wood, and reducing it to much smaller pieces and a pile of sawdust.  In the AM this was one long plank, and it had many cuts laid out and marked to make best use of the plank.  Before lunch it had been crosscut into three shorter more manageable lengths, and all three had passed through the jointer.

Finally these pieces are then ripped to width on the table saw, here being operated by Simon and John.  I think we ended up thirteen pieces of wood cut to dimension, ready to start the process all over again.  Routing, rabbeting, chopping, mortising, tenoning, etc.  These will make two rear facing windows for the cupola cab on the plow.

Victor Humphreys was on hand and tried his skills with an acetylene torch, removing more deteriorated metal from our B&O wagon top boxcar, doing some painting on the X 38 snowplow as it got warmer in the afternoon sun, and finally painting six pieces of metal weatherstripping inside the shop.  Pete Galayda and John Nelligan continued their work on the resistance grids for Charles City Western 300, Tim Peters was mounting new roofboards to CTA 4412, and we saw several others passing through on their way for a tool or part.