Illinois Railway Museum Blog

There was a good deal of progress in the steam shop this weekend.  It was a rather shortened day as I attended the Board meeting in the morning and the development of the winter storm had a number of people who live to the North leaving earlier than usual.

Progress in fitting fire tubes

On 1630:

·         First priority was that Dennis worked with Mike and Jerry on the corner patch.    Completing the patch is the critical path item as we cannot plan even initial hydro testing of the tubes until the boiler is water tight in this area!.  A few adjustments were necessary to get the edges to align exactly where Dennis needs them to provide the correct spacing for welding.  Once this is complete they will move on to heat the patch in situ in order to finally bend it into the complex shape needed to match the inner firebox.  The trick with forming the patch is that it must be formed accurately in 3 dimensions as it must fit not only to the obvious bend around the mud ring but to align with the tubesheet, which is not vertical but slopes forward.

·         The statistics on tube rolling do not look impressive.  We are now about 25% thru rolling the firebox end.  However this conceals some critical progress.  The time spent rolling tubes was limited as Dennis and the team working on the patch had first call on access to the firebox and the new tube roller will not arrive until the coming week.  However, we did manage to roll all the tubes that had been problematic last week. 

·         We do now believe that we have the issue of the "walking" ferrules solved.  It seems that, when fitting ferruled tubes at the firebox end, they should not be simply rolled into place.  The essential tool is a segmented punch similar to that used to expand the ferrules into place.  The difference is that this one has projections that seat on the tube sheet around the tube (to stop it driving the tube forward).  When driven by an air hammer, the segments expand with sufficient force to expand the tube.  The major difference from the roller is that the punch expands slightly more on the boiler side creating a taper which prevents the ferrule moving forward (the roller would tend to taper the other way encouraging the ferrule to "walk").  Apparently some railroads fitted the firebox ends solely using these punches, normally applied three times to each tube to ensure an even seal.  Given that we have the roller, we will now fit the tube with one application of this expander then roll briefly to ensure an even seal.  This should be more efficient as the toughest part is getting the punch back out after it has been air hammered into place.

·         Ed and Phil progressed steadily with the replacement pipe work along the boiler.

In other areas

·         Richard and Bob test wired the new compressor to its control panel.  This allowed us to run the motor and compressor briefly and confirm that the electrical supply works as planned.  (It should start at a reduced power and then step up to full power after a short delay, which this test proved it is doing correctly.)  The reservoir was moved back to the compressor area so, in the next couple of weeks, we should be able to mount the compressor to the floor, fabricate a new air intake filter (as one is missing) and then connect the compressor to the reservoir, which will enable full testing.

·         Jeff is finalizing the layout for the pipe work and we should get the scissor lift in shortly so that we can start fixing the pipe work into the roof of the shop.

·         Bob continued with rebuilding the control gear for the planer.

No pictures this week as most of what was happening was continuing existing activities (and I was too busy doing the job to photograph the tube expander in operation !!).  However significant progress was made on a number of important tasks.

Nigel