Illinois Railway Museum Blog

We are moving away from the traditional pattern that my jottings on Sunday are a simple summary of what happened the previous day !.   Increasingly work is taking place several days a week whenever people are available.   Since last Saturday one or more people have been in the shop on several days.

The focus is on 1630 and particularly on completing the riveting.

Progress on the riveting has been steady.  It may be slower than we might have hoped but it has to be correctly done and we are now well on our way to completion.

·         On Tuesday Dennis made good around the hole for the rivet that had to be removed after last Saturday.

·         On Wednesday a team including Tom, Mike, Phil, Rod and Jerry worked most of the day and set three more rivets including the first two countersunk rivets in the corner itself.

·         Yesterday Ralph took over from Rod in the critical role of forming the rivet head and three more rivets were placed.  This took us into the worst area of all, the apex of the corner.  These should be far the worst ones we have to place and they are now in and good.  The reason that this area is nasty is not apparent from the outside.  Externally the rivet heads appear well spaced (and actually have patch screws between them).  However, the geometry of a tight bend means that, on the inner sheet, the rivet head are as close as they can be.  So in some cases, once one rivet has been installed, it must be caulked and any excess material removed to ensure that the bucker can be placed to drive the adjacent rivet.  According to Tom's reading of some railroad maintenance standards this is not a new problem.  This suggests that, in later years, some (the Santa Fe was likely one) did not use rivets thru the apex of the bend but welded the corner to the mud ring.  This would probably be logical when thinking of the forces involved.  The strength of the sheet when bent into a tight radius curve will be such that there is probably little force on the rivets in the corner as the boiler is pressurized.  However, this is academic in our case as welding the corner would require the mud ring to be solid in that area, not thru drilled for rivets as it is on 1630 ..... and we are surely not in the business of replacing a section of the mud ring which is in perfectly good condition !.

·         So, after these efforts we have 3 more rivets to fit.  These are ones that require some additional forming of the holes for the countersink before they can be placed and this will hopefully continue during the coming week.

10 rivets in place and 3 to go

Around the critical riveting we continued to progress other jobs in preparation for the testing and reassembly that will kick off once the rivets and stays are in place.

·         Paul and Cameron continued the installation of wires to hold the insulation.  The firebox is now well on its way to completion.  Nigel spent quite a while wondering how on earth to wire the sides of the firebox where there is no apparent way to secure the wires to the firebox.  After a bit of cussing about the lack of any photographs of the old wiring before we took it off .... Tom pointed out that there is no wiring because the insulation in this area is attached to the cladding sheets so that it can be easily removed to check the stays that are behind the cladding in this area.

·         With Vince's help I installed all the wash out plugs aside from the one in the immediate area of the riveting.  This is a job that requires care.  The plugs are brass and have a tapered thread to seal into the steel boiler sheets.  They must be cleaned, lubricated with the graphite sealing compound and carefully run into the threads before being finally tightened with a wrench.  While the final tightening requires significant torque, it is critical that the plug is smoothly in its thread before force is applied.  The results of forcing a cross threaded brass plug is pretty devastating to the brass threads !.

·         Jeff is setting up to cut insulation blocks ready for installation.  (If you visualize rectangular blocks of insulation that are to be fitted around the outside of the circular boiler barrel, we will need a whole lot of blocks with the long edges cut to a standard angle to fit closely with the adjacent blocks).  Hopefully we will have these precut and ready for when we are able to fit them.

·         The smokebox front ring was retrieved from storage and set up on stands in front of the shop where it will be used to cut the pattern for the gasket that will be required to seal it to the front of the smokebox.  Alex made good progress in wire brushing the surface ready to start work on the gasket.

Work in progress cleaning the smokebox ring

So work continues steadily.  Once the last three rivets are in place we will be close to the next big step of testing the tubes for leakage.

Nigel